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2005-12-19, Monday 11:02am

No one will probably every feel the difference (except me), but the new version of the blog is approaching functionality and I'm beginning to shift over. This morning I've finally succeeded in reestablishing the layout of this page, in the process learning how format the page more consciously with tables. I also learned how to load javascript through a separate file, which will make the site lighter. Right now, the list of possible backgrounds and the full text of the many random quotes the pages choose from are loaded with each page. Now they will be loaded only once. I know, but try to contain your excitement.

2005-12-15, Thursday 9:38pm

It's not going well. Gave up blog development early in the morning with hopes of roadtripping out to Montauk for the weekend. For some reason, pair.com servers won't recognize my plugins, which are what make the blog at all configurable. Since then I've been caught up with planning this future of planning panel for early next semester that will probably be called "How will we plan tomorrow?" I think it's a suggestive name, since it implies both outcome and process, but it probably sounds too plebian for people to catch its cleverness.

But I'm just logging on to say that The Bridge has to be one of the finest shows I've caught on tv lately. Old school hip hop videos with an educational bent. Courtesy TV13.

The other thing I added today (via metafilter) is the Google plugin that generates a popup containing a list of blogs that mention/discuss the contents of the page by tracing links listed in Blogger blogs. I'm not sure if it's at all worthwhile. In fact, I fear it will grow annoying, but it's something that seems worth checking out. Only one Blogger blog has ever linked to me.

2005-12-15, Thursday 8:11am

I am in the process of designing and switching over to a new site using Blosxom to allow your flood of comments and thoughts. I think it's going to take a while, but it'll be an appropriately geeky distraction from studying for my sectoral exam. If you'd like to see my progress, which is >zero< to date, click here.

2005-12-12, Monday 2:38pm

If you live in NYC, you'll want to take advantage of this google hack that mashes up the MTA subway map with google maps. There's even a Firefox search plug-in.

2005-12-09, Friday 8:06pm

Slacking all around. Today I spend a good chunk of time talking to a second year about her thesis topic. She was kind enough to buy me coffee and lunch, but I probably got most of the fain out of the conversation, too. After we were done, Andrew Gelman's statement about how working with models has helped him gain intuition about how they work started to make sense. In the process of helping her think through how she could set up an informative regression that would provide insight into the movement of families to the suburbs (or lack thereof), we wrestled with how to get the data, what variables would be appropriate, and what could actually be said with the data. It was only preliminary, but dead interesting. And I realized that it is only by grappling with different data problems like this that I will develop my ability to use them. Quantitative analysis is art as much as it is math.

2005-12-08, Thursday 5:16pm

So slacking on the updates. Anyway, I learned something new about myself today. After a meeting with the head of the search committee for our department's new hires, which I felt went pretty well, a second-year dual degree (planning/architecture) student told us that I have a reputation among the architects. Apparently, at some point in the past, I said that "architects should be designing bathrooms". I've always had an oppositional relation to the architects in our school, generally considering the products I've seen as interesting sculpture perfectly suitable for an MFA program but pointless as far as buildings are concerned. I guess I've been outspoken enough--and memorable enough(?)--to have developed a reputation. I think the story is apocryphal. I mean, if I haven't thought they were designing living spaces, why would I suggest that they design the most intimate of living spaces? Maybe it's a misinterpretation of something I said. Or maybe I was genuinely drunk enough to make such a comment at some point (it's not out of the question). But I'm going to guess that my outspoken opposition has led to an architect's "urban myth" being affixed to me. It's quite flattering in a way. The only question now is if I should leverage the belief and ramp up my challenge or let people know that growing exposure to some interesting architecture and achitects has softened my opposition.

Who knows? Maybe I said something about a particular project that looked like it should be a bathroom. Actually, coming to think of it, this may very well have happened at the end of year show. It might have been a compliment...or not. I do have strong opinions about what I think is good art. Maybe I was looking at shit.

2005-11-28, Monday 7:29pm

Pretty delightful Turkeyday back at the folks' place. Got lots of rest. Built forts and played horsie with the nieces out in the woods. Ate lots.

And I've been denying the needs of the people (i.e., the students in Sumila's class, whose papers are piling up) to pursue my own reading interests. Right now it's Jean Baudrillard and Herbert Marcuse. In The Mirror of Production, Baudrillard addresses Marcuse's modern, post-Freudian reading of Marx in the course of dealing with Marx himself. His basic argument is that by adopting the language of production, Marxism perpetuates (reproduces) the political economy of capitalism. Instead, he claims that a truly dialectical approach would look beyond the use of these capitalist terms to describe pre-technological and future societies and appreciate the symbolic exchange that took place in a world where labor as such did not exist (since it was inseparable from social relations, ownership, and technology). It may be the practical side of Marcuse, which does not expect that we will be able to do away with productive labor, which in turn mitigates claims of complete liberation in One Dimensional Man, that causes him to fall afoul of Baudrillard, but it is also that he advocates a productive Eros (in Eros and Civilization). Eros, Baudrillard seems to claim, is not productive; it is beyond production, in a unification of use, creation, destruction, and labor. To this end, he makes a remarkably interesting claim (p105-6) that even the reclamation of the complete production cycle for the laborer, which he (rightly) claims is the naive dream of some Marxists and capitalists, is not a liberation of Eros but rather a repressive desublimination of labor into acceptable channels, echoing Marcuse's discussion of sexual 'liberation' in the 1960s. For me, the beautiful thing is that it places the new creative workplace right back into a neo-Marxist framework and questions its real value as a fulfilling organization of society.

2005-11-21, Monday 5:38pm

Alert, CU planners! Here is some hot gossip that you definitely did not get from me. It came from the Internet (see first link). Dean Wigley seems to have stumbled into a dream opportunity, that of remaking the urban planning department in his image. On the street today, I heard that our beloved Elliott Sclar is a public candidate for Dean of the College of Architecture and Planning at "U-dub". It's sensible move for Elliott. The CSUD money he was awarded by Volvo is connected to him, not the university, so moving won't affect that opportunity for him ("for him", I emphasize). Both his kids are now out of the house, so he probably wants to rethink his lodging options. And with all the big town stress of New York, it might be nice to ease into retirement in a small college town in the Pacific Northwest. Hell, it sounds good to me.

But, with Susan leaving, Sig retired, and Peter playing a smaller role, Elliott's departure would leave Lance as our most senior (and may I add, as of yet untenured) faculty member. Following him will be Sumila, who has been here for almost a year, and Jason, who arrived in September.

The odd thing is that I'm not devastated, as I was when I learned of Susan's departure. Perhaps it's because I haven't seen or felt Elliott's presence much over the last two years, and thus don't sense the loss. Perhaps it's because the crushing despair of Susan's department crumbling departure has already forced me to abandon all hope. Perhaps I'm just in (necessary?) denial. It's probably that his (potential) departure is the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. If all the rats are abandoning ship, perhaps it's time to find a new ship. There's just no fighting it.

For the Dean, this is obviously a wonderful opportunity to build a new department in line with his vision for the department. And with the announcement, any real pressure to maintain coherence with the past will dissipate, allowing the Dean to rethink the entire selection process. Though I've little doubt that the Dean will confound my expectations, my fear is that our department will wind up as the policy wing of urban design and architecture. And perhaps this is the truly visionary course to steer...for Columbia.

Regardless, if Elliott goes, there is no question in my mind that our department will be fundamentally transformed.

2005-11-18, Friday 9:10pm

As usual, I promised Sumila I'd work for the past two days on the Nairobi material and it didn't happen. Suddenly all the students are in need of attention and I got going on my preparing my readings for colloquium after Thanksgiving. I'm in charge of presenting readings on Marcuse's The Aesthetic Dimension, which argues against a reified Marxist aesthetics and for art as an eternal movement toward freedom. It achieves its transformational mimesis through a unification of content and form that communicates universal truths of Eros and Thanatos and reconciles the irreconcilable passing and arising of the beautiful. Art, he claims, is affirmative. Even though the good emerges only temporarily as an island of freedom amid an ocean of evil and repression, the consitutive beauty of true art reveals to us positive possibilities outside the established reality (or discourse for you post-modern hacks). The book has given me a new view of Marcuse (and his son). Just as art unveils affirmative 'otherworldly' possibilities, his philosophy and writing is actively engaged in evoking and sustaining these same possibilities through the beauty of dialectical logic. It underlines the necessity of sustaining and promoting optimism about a better future.

My time consuming distraction, however, was spicing up the reading selection with current writing on the role of art in society. Prompted by a discussion of the role of artists in community development in the fall issue of Progressive Planning, I inserted a few of the pieces along with some Richard Florida and spiced them up with Auerbach, Basquiat, and Kollwitz. It should bring up questions of the contemporary role of art and artists...and even if many can be called artists if they are now incorporated into the 'established reality'...or maybe that's a positive thing that indicates a brighter future? Could it be that the greater effort to reintegrate the creative, transformational beautiful into our lives will improve society?

For a brief time, you can find this collection here.

2005-11-17, Thursday 8:54am

Added a brief faq on solidifying thesis questions. It needs to be elaborated, but the essence of the approach I suggest is there.

2005-11-14, Monday 8:46pm

It's been a pretty good day. I explained the rudiments of my new dissertation topic, about which Peter remarked, "That could work", to Susan and Lance, and Susan seemed to like it quite a bit. She even reaffirmed that she would be on my committee. This is, of course, vital, since my topic now is rather in line with some of her current work (megaprojects) and career work (urban political regimes). One of the idea's strengths is that it is transdisciplinary. I'm not ready to lay it out here yet, but you can get a hint by visiting this site or this one. Consequently, I'm feeling pretty good about things for the moment. In fact, I'm feeling pretty darned excited. It is odd, however, to find myself with something so solid, even if it's still vaporous.

And for those of you hunting for interesting links, bldg-blog is a very cool planning/architecture blog with lots of nice(?) photos.

2005-11-10, Thursday 11:12am

So our sixth wedding anniversary turned out to be an intimate romantic dinner and drink for just the three of us: Yoonkyung, Brad, and I. It also turned out that Nicky's, while making excellent and cheap bahn mi, is not the intimate kind of LES experience that say Caracas Arepa Bar is. It was much more of a take out joint. And then it was on to Coxley's (?) for digestion-challenging chicken wings, a variety of beers, and two teams I still do not know playing Monday night football. Very pleasant.

2005-11-07, Monday 4:13pm

Every birthday, New Year, Christmas, and anniversary, Yoonkyung expects me to write some long romantic letter about how I love her and how wonderful it is to be with her and how I hope we're together forever and (in a very Korean way) how I'll dedicate myself to working even harder to make her happy. Well, here it is:

1. 사랑 해.
2. 넌 너무 너무 너무 훌륭하고 친절하고 착하고 멋지고 이쁘고 등 등 등.
3. 연원히 같이 있고 싶어.
4. 이제 너를 더 행복하도록 더 열심히 해볼게.

끝.

2005-11-07, Monday 9:15am

If you want to crash my sixth anniversary dinner, I'll be at Nicky's Vietnamese Sandwiches. In the meantime my life seems to have become dedicated to Sumila's needs. The problem with being a TA is that you have to do all the readings thoroughly. That means I've got 500 pages to do for her this week...and I've got to grade eight ten-page papers. I'm going to have to get her to take some responsibility for grading some of the next two papers. It's a great class, but way too much work for all of us.

But that's not why I wanted to write. I wanted to recommend Talking Head to all of you who enjoy a philosophical movie. The director of Ghost in the Shell and others (Mamoru Oshii) reflects on the nature of film and animation, ostensibly seeking a new beginning through a serial killer mystery. I also saw Beautiful Boxer, a film about a trannie Muay Thai boxer based on a true story. It probably didn't deserve to be nominated for the all the awards it was (probably driven by the content), but it was pretty good nonetheless.

2005-11-06, Sunday 12:05pm

When you visit me in NYC, I deliver...even if it's by accident. Yesterday, my sister's family and my cousin came into town to visit the Bronx Zoo. Afterward we headed over to Arthur Ave, the remnants of a historically Italian neighborhood near the zoo that is now becoming more Balkan. No sooner do we arrive than some dmeonstration or something starts heading down the sidewalk toward us. Buried inside the 'demonstration' is Mayor Bloomberg, who is out on the town pressing palms in advance of Tuesday's election. He pressed mine. For what it is--and my wife told me not to write this--his hand was very soft...not just the skin, but the fleshiness. Perhaps it was swollen and bruised from all the handshaking. Anyway, visit me in NYC and I deliver the mayor.

Went to Kansas City, Missouri a week and a half ago for the ACSP conference. It was quite pleasant, especially given that I had no presentation to worry about (though that should never happen again). Elizabeth was the total diva starlet. She did great, interviewed like crazy, and was totally networked by Susan. She's definitely doing work that people get excited about, and she's going to do alright. The girl is so ideally marketed. Met lots of great people. Seems like a lot of senior people, a lot of youngsters, and few in the middle. Where are they? APPAM?

2005-10-23, Sunday 11:04am

I come to you with freaky news. The power of the internet to amplify people's evil intentions has reached a new height in Korea, where it is called 'cyberterror'. Following upon 'dog shit girl', we now have 'alcohol shit girl'(KO). I don't know if there are English versions of the story out there yet, but the basic deal is that some asshole at a 'booking bar', at which guys are actively set up with women by the waiters who sometimes virtually drag a girl over (in a anthropological show of resistance and virtue presumably). The guy plies the girl with drinks and hopes for a happy outcome (whatever that may be). In this case, the guy was set up with a verrrry drunk girl. Much to his delight, she passed out at the bar. So, like any self-respecting guy, he picked her up, threw her over his shoulder, and took her to a hotel to rape her. Unfortunately for him, when he'd finally removed most of her clothes, he discovered that she had shat herself. As if waking up in the morning wasn't already going to be embarassing and painful enough for the girl, the dude was so pissed off that he took pictures of everything, including her ID card, and posted it all over the internet. Her life in Korea is now a nightmare. I can only hope that they manage to track the bastard down and stash him in one of Korea's notorious prisons.

And, as if this isn't obvious, there are some chatboard comments in Korean that it was basically the girl's fault and she should have known better than to let herself get that drunk in a disgusting place like that. If these writers have never made stupid mistakes before, their lives must be an incredibly restrained,uncomfortable existence.

I honestly don't think I understand humanity.

2005-10-15, Saturday 11:44am

Word for the day: autochthonous. It's both awkward and mellifluous at the same time.

My goal for the weekend is to read all of Lefebvre's Writings on Cities. It's unlikely to happen, but I've made a good start, and it's fantastic. In the first piece he argues that organized rationality has changed inhabitation to habitat, stripping urban society of its use value. He claims that in preindustrial society cities were treated by their oppressive rulers as oeuvres, essentially works of art, through the unproductive expenditure of capital on civic spaces and la Fête. Industrialization, however, has induced problems related to growth and planning. Unfortunately, analytical reasoning, which seeks to solve the sicknesses or order that it identifies, is a self-contained system that a priori posits its own methodology as the solution. This makes it an ideology as opposed to an appropriate analytical framework. Instead, we must employ dialectical reason to account for contradictory impulses.

One thing I think he misses in his account of preindustrial versus industrial society is that those "unproductive expenditures of capital" may have served as the price of legitimation. Livingston presents the similar use of such expenditures in the City Beautiful movement to legitimate the role of capital in opposition to that of physical labor. So the idea of cities as oeuvres is not quite so clean as he might have it.

2005-10-11, Tuesday 7:07pm

Via Metafilter again--and this is clearly a sign that I'm growing lazy or thoughtless or busy--here is an interesting take on Web 2.0, the renewed spiritual quest for fulfillment through the Internet. However, if it's just a machine, as opposed to a Machine, why shouldn't we again strive to use it as a Machine?

2005-10-09, Sunday 12:29pm

Via Metafilter, I just came across VRMag, which has panoramic VR vistas of New Orleans after Katrina (among other amazing things). (High bandwidth advisable.)

And last night, for the first time ever, I saw A Clockwork Orange. I've long wanted to see it, but I'd avoided because everyone would tell me it was so disturbing. I've no doubt it upset a lot of people when it came out. And the content is disturbing. But I had been under the impression that it was violent in ways I prefer to avoid. Wrong. It's a brilliant film that may be more attuned to contemporary trends than I'd like to imagine. (I don't actually have any in mind, but it seemed like the right thing to write.)

2005-10-07, Friday 6:03pm

Well, it's over. The day-long symposium (Katrina and Urban Policy: Rights, Risk, and Redevelopment) has taken place and I can start to think about my own studies as well as what to do next. In the end, I have very mixed feelings about the outcome. There was lots of interesting dialogue, great speakers, new ideas, new connections, etc. It was a good day. However, despite the PR from the university and our department, turnout was much smaller than anticipated. We got more for the Kelo panel than Katrina, and I'd have thought Katrina would have been more compelling. I have to imagine that the basic problem was that it was a rainy Friday that fell the first day after a transit alert. Not the most auspicious circumstances.

The discussion of rights was limited...as is my energy. Signing off.

2005-09-28, Wednesday 8:34am

It seems as though last night's Kelo panel was a success. But it doesn't seem as though the first year students are interested. Free wine, free food, and still the vanish as soon as the event is over...if they even showed up in the first place. In their place, we had a strong contingent of real estate people. This, for me, was very exciting. The planning - real estate dialogue is ripe for development, so to speak. The developer perspective generated a great deal of emotional response from the planners and the developers (at least from one conversation I overhead) fail to recognize that democracy is not a perfect institution and that development may have broader social impacts. I guess this is what makes the interdisciplinary approach so potent: there is strong disagreement on the panel. And disagreement generates thought, defense, rethinking, and growth.

I hope the Katrina symposium also goes so well...and I'm sure it will.

2005-09-26, Monday 7:21pm

Maybe it's too much coffee, too much work, and too much frustration, but I've just gotta share. My event organizing responsibilities are overtaking my studies and my research...and today it's making me nuts. People cancelling at the last minute. People changing my arrangements and making me clean up after them and redo work I've already done. I'm sure it's a familiar story to everyone, but today it's getting to me. Perhaps because it's appended to other crap.

At today's LiPs, some students were presenting on work they did over the summer. Perhaps they could have had more content, and perhaps they were pleased to have the assistance, but I felt they were hijacked. Some of our program's professors were there and wound up using the talk as a platform for voicing their opinions about issues around the students' work. And, frankly, I'm not against this...unless, as today, the official speakers are marginalized, which happened to too great an extent today. When there are speakers, especially in a lecture series, the speakers should be the focus. People can respond, contradict, oppose, agree, support, query, inquire all they like, but as far as I'm concerned the focus should always be on the speakers. Down with grandstanders! But let me emphasize that this was simply a slightly too prevalent tendency today, not an egregious abuse. But it disturbed me nonetheless.

In other news, Elliott Sclar has bailed on tomorrow night's Kelo v. New London panel for other duties. It turns out he's a mini-Jeff Sachs, who has frequently been seen with Bono and made a documentary with Angelina Jolie. Tomorrow night, he is attending a clearly worthwhile event that he apparently double-booked (big surprise, that) for the Sustainable South Bronx. Afterward, he is going to be travelling around Queens with a NYTimes reporter and an actor from Maria Full of Grace, showing the reporter that overcrowding persists here in NYC as well. Completely worthwhile and I fully support the good work, but I love the fact that the UN is partnering up all its arguably less glamorous academics and bureaucrats with movie stars and rock stars to promote its agenda. Brilliant marketing, but still a lark.

2005-09-22, Thursday 8:51am

The rapture well be nigh...to my neighborhood. For some reason, the fire trucks have visited our block four or five times over the last week. Somewhere around four am last night, there were several small explosions a couple of doors down that had them out in blaring force. Since we moved in almost two years ago now, they've been to the block only once or twice, and now all of a sudden... It can only mean the apocalypse.

2005-09-21, Wednesday 5:26pm

The rapture is nigh! With another new hurricane barreling in on the South, if people weren't apocalyptic (or should it be apoplectic?) by now, they'll be there soon.

So Peter's picks for Susan's successor include her choice of Bob and Susan Christopherson, whose name sounds familiar and whom I really should know since she does some of what I do but whom I don't know. Apparently, she's also open to a change.

It also turns out that we may be able to make another junior hire as well. Peter has declined to name names, but the name of our other international development profs was floated in other quarters. Everyone loves her syllabus and she has a veritable pantheon on her dissertation committee, but we'll see how her teaching turns out. Beautifully, I'm sure. So already, without ever having met her, I'm becoming infatuated.

And, in LiPs news, the public, who I thought had abandoned the project, has responded enthusiastically as soon as I trotted it out as an anemic, malnourished child who only needed a half-hour a week to live a full life. Amazing and heartwarming response, which is going to make everyone's lives even easier. See folks, I think we learned something today. When we all pitch in together, everyone's life becomes easier and more fulfilling. Ahhh....

2005-09-18, Sunday 11:24pm

Y2K's in the air and winging her way back to the States. That is, of course, if she hasn't decided to ditch being around me and my studying ways in favor of a much richer existence in the land of Kimchi and Soju. I wouldn't blame her. I went out once all weekend. And I had to force myself to, at that. Vegetable shopping. Funny that I need an excuse just to go out and get some sunshine. Gotta work on that.

Anyway, I also wanted to point out a curiosity about my upcoming semester. Now that I've come to believe that the idea of the Frankfurt school that technological rationality shapes and serves capitalist organization could (and should) be accurately applied to the field of economics today, I'm suddenly awash in economics. I'm not sure if I should be happy or frustrated. Happy, I suppose, since now I can approach my studies with a broader, more critical eye. But frustrated, too, that I cannot focus on the other approaches to questions of development. I'm going in both directions at once: the sociological construction of knowledge and a highly quantitative approach to modeling questions. I just hope the resultant schizophrenia is a serviceable one.

And, by the way, 'The Iceman' burns.

2005-09-12, Monday 9:21am

Brevity, as I'm already behind. It seems my class-taking ambition is coming to an abrupt halt. I'm going to bow out of two classes that look really interesting, but would make my life miserable if I tried to keep up. It's time to narrow and focus.

So, for department gossip mongers, Bob Beauregard is Susan's personal pick for a replacement and is reportedly interested. Peter has others in mind (and I will try to procure those names for you all, but in the meantime, my guess is that Neil Smith is one). Susan insists, perhaps rightly, that the program needs another big name to maintain and continue to build its reputation. I'd suggest, however, that we also need someone of Peter's sentiments for the long run integrity of our department's stated mission of addressing social equity. I think Bob is great, and those of my colleagues who have taken classes with him have only the highest praise. He's a strong theorist, but I'm concerned that his theorizing is more intellectual recreation rather than dedication to improving people's lives. I'm more than prepared to discover that this is an inaccurate impression, and I imagine I will eventually do so. But so far I've seen him speak twice. First was at last year's ACSP meeting, where he took a purposively provocative and entertaining position that the past has nothing to offer present planning, in contradistinction to Robert Fishman, who was arguing that the past is the only thing that enriches the present. The other time was when he came to speak at our lecture series and discussed site versus place. He set up a pleasant distinction in which (basically) sites were for developers and places were for residents, but he demurred from drawing any conclusions from this...or even putting forth an effort to do so. I'm certainly not opposed by any means. In fact, on balance I probably support his candidacy. But I do have a minor reservation that I wanted to register.

And, before I go, I've got to give some props to Y2K, who's off travelling on business in Shanghai. In her absence, I am once again responsible for providing for all my needs, including healthy, tasty food and a clean house. I'm coming to recognize once again how much she does to make my life so good, not least of which is cooking the super-tasty dishes I can't even hope to aspire to assemble. So let this be a paean to partnership. Working together definitely makes life an easier proposition.

2005-09-05, Monday 11:24pm, Labor Day

People, it is done. I have emailed my colloquium paper from last semester to Susan. I abandoned sections and I treated others cursorily, but I have passed it in and can move forward as a free man...at least until the first syllabus rolls across my lap at 9:30am tomorrow.

So it was a serious Labor Day for me. I finished my paper. I jogged. And I made a lasagna. Y2K had bought all the vegetables and most of the fixins over a week ago...except for an extra box of noodles. Before they all went bad and before two days of classes that will extend until at least 8pm, I had to put them into lasagna form. Unfortunately, as I got started, I also discovered that I had to make new sauce as well. Anyway, three hours of cooking that will probably keep me fed the whole time she's away. Horrific timing, but hopefully good in the long run.

Goodnight, and yay! me.

2005-09-05, Monday 12:17pm, Labor Day

I'm going for a jog and then I work. I swear. First, though, here is a link to a stratfor article on the strategic importance of New Orleans and why a new city will have to be built in the same location (via metafilter). We will never transcend geography.

2005-09-05, Monday 11:08am, Labor Day

Before I go to work (for I shall finish my paper for Susan today), I want to comment on opinions about Bush's leadership during the Katrina Crisis, like those of Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman (Yes, I read the Times). These columns rightly point out Bush's failure to take on a leadership role or to take action (period). The are rightly disgusted by his small talk about how he used to party in New Orleans and about how poor Trent Lott lost one of his houses in the flood but would rebuild it fantastically. This is all true and important for those looking for inspiration as they try to deal with this tragedy, but it overlooks the fact that Bush is not in charge. They presume he actually makes decisions, that he is something more than a figurehead. I think more attention needs to be focused on Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other decision makers and what they have or have not been doing. We can complain about how the President's unwillingness to interrupt his umpteenth month of vacation contributed to the mess, but he wouldn't have been making the decisions even if he'd been in the White House. Instead, he'd be in the weight room trying to convince Karl Rove to come along and exercise instead of starting to accept bids for the rebuilding and speculate in property (pure speculation there). Or he'd be trying to talk Cheney into reading Chicken Soup for the Soulless. It's the whereabouts and the decisions made by these individuals that we need to focus on, not Bush's bumbling of the PR.

And just who is going to get the money to rebuild?

And apparently some are calling the flood waters, "Lake George".

2005-09-02, Friday 1:20pm

I'm gonna work, really. But first two things. First one thing is that last night was the Bohemia Beer Garden, Astoria, Queens welcome (back) to school. Much fun, much good beer. I didn't spend as much time with the new students as I would have liked, but definitely liked those with whom I did spend time. Of course, I've now lost any hope of presenting a sophisticated, knowledgable, respectable face appropriate to my position in the academic hierarchy. But I guess it was just a matter of time in the end.

The other thing I wanted to bring up a few days ago (and I'm still avoiding the war mongering induced trajedy in New Orleans) is that of the stampede on the bridge during the religious procession in Iraq. My thought is that it is the true expression of the effect of terrorism. It reflects precisely the impact that terrorists seek to have on the population. The possibility and fear of an attack at any time in any place puts people so on edge that they will panic at even the potential threat. People live in perpetual fear. Now we know the terror campaign is successful.

2005-08-31, Wednesday 9:33am

Orientation is happening now. The semester is beginning. And the odd thing is that there is no real reason for me to be there. I don't have any critical role for the incoming class, like TAing a section of a required class, so there's no need to be there. Of course, there's the curiosity factor, which draws me, but I will also see them tomorrow morning...and really should, uh, work.

I should also be going down to NYU to protest the refusal of the administration there to bargain any longer with the union they recognized not two years ago. The NLRB reversal of the right of private university TAs and RAs to organize has led the NYU administration to rescind their deal. This is a major setback for labor and promises to eviscerate all our gains. But it's an hour down and an hour back for an hour of marching in the rain (probably).

On the list of things done I can now include a DVD. I put together all the videos Sumila has on water and sanitation in developing countries into a DVD so that we don't have to worry about getting a TV and VCR for class. It seems to have worked out well, except that the PAL player generated only black and white with some lines. But it's processed and done. I've also almost got her reader put together. Print the covers and recopy one article, and I'm golden. Almost ready for the semester.

Now there's only Susan's paper. To work!

2005-08-25, Thursday 9:25am

I should be working (of course), but I feel compelled to mention my landmark accomplishment yesterday. I went surfing. It was Rockaway. The waves were crap. I got pushes from Brad. And I tweaked muscles I don't recall having. But I did get up...on my knees. And it was good. The thing that surprised me was the feeling of lightness and manoeuverability once you're up. Not that I manoeuvered or got up, but even from my low perch I could sense that the board was more bouyant and, well, loose than I expected.

Of course, prior to that, Brad and I had the pleasure of watching a woman who had paddled out on a windsurf board without the sail get rescued by a full complement of New York's finest. The woman, who had been described as "slightly imbalanced" was waving (at the beach or airplanes was not clear for some time). After consultation between the lifeguards and Parks Department folk on ATVs, a lifeguard on a board went out followed by a lifeguard who swam (nut). But that's not the end, suddenly we had police cars and fire trucks zooming in. We were ushered off the beach and onto the boardwalk. They sent two more guys out with boards tethered to ropes on the shore. A helicopter came to survey the situation. And the situation didn't end until she had been pulled all the way in (perfectly healthy...physically) and a man in a yellow decontamination suit had reached the scene. I don't know. Maybe there was some chatter about a terrorist surfer or something.

2005-08-22, Monday 8:58pm

Alright, kids, wind up your Quicktime machine and set your coordinates to the stunning This Spartan Life. This well crafted and fairly entertaining machinima takes the medium to new reflexive heights. It (slightly) engages the potential of the gaming environment. And it breaks new ground for the genre. (via Metafilter)

2005-08-16, Tuesday 12:09am

I now think I know what it is like to have a stroke. I'm just back from my dentist, who filled my left jaw with novacaine, disabling the left side of my face and tongue. I can't wait for it to fade. I'm afraid to move, chew, speak, etc. until it does.

Nothing exciting to report this week. My epistemological sociology of knowledge quest is on hold for both the Nairobi slum study and my own paper for Susan. I've gone back to Neil Smith to finish uneven development. I'm looking at Savitch and Kantor's Cities in the International Marketplace to try to obtain some concrete evaluation of globalization and urbanization.

Outside of that, I've actually been messing around with some graphic design. I put together a cover for the class I'm TAing in the fall. And more interestingly, I took a stab at some neo-situationist posters for my upcoming campaign of terror against the inhumanity of capitalism. Since that's a phrase that electronic surveillance will surely flag, let me reassure my DHS readers that it shall only consist of posting a few inadequately designed posters around campus in an effort to provoke thought, not violence.

2005-08-08, Monday 9:09am

Should get to work, but...first things first. Saw (or rather heard from a distance) M.I.A. yesterday at Summer Stage. She sucked. The beats were great, but the girl can't sing and she can't rap. She does seem to have something "unique" going on...as in, uniquely bad. But for some this is a plus. For me, I won't tolerate it. I've nothing against M.I.A., Sri Lanka, or London, but in world this broad, there is no reason I should have to put up with her lack of talent. And so, I won't.

More interestingly, I finally got a copy of The Many Faces of Go, widely reputed to be the best Go program out there. Now there's a distraction I can indulge in. I suck, but Go is probably the best board game ever. It even tops chess in my book.

On another front, I've turned to Wittgenstein to boost my philosophy of language, its construction, and its use. Of course, for Wittgenstein, all three of these components are one...and that's what's so fascinating. One important claim, as far as my feeble understanding will take me, is that meaning is really an amorphous family of relations associated with a word developed over time through the repetition of language games, which perpetually adjust the field of relations around the word (sometimes toward more clarity, sometimes less). The catch is that he has yet to describe how we develop these categories or relations, and thus I can't really compare him to Sperber yet. It seems he could go against Sperber by arguing treating symbolism as simply another organizing conception since encyclopaedic knowledge is illusory, or support him by suggesting that we develop new signifiers for phenomenon that break too far from existing families of meaning.

2005-08-03, Wednesday 7:09pm

Had to correct a few typos in that last entry, but that still doesn't stop it from demonstrating a compulsion to write despite inspiration rather than a natural desire.

Anyway, I've got about twenty pages in Sperber to go and now I'm having my doubts. There's no doubt that he's got fascinating ideas, but I'm getting concerned that he's not going to explain the emergence of symbols and symbolism. Basically, he's arguing that if some sensory input cannot be processed according to what cognitive semantic rules based on categories and relationships between them, it defaults to a symbolic level (for lack of a better word) that does not try to resolve conflicts among existing "literal" categories, which he calls "encyclopaedic". My concern is that this internal metacategorization (a category about categories) really becomes just that, another category. And if it becomes "just another category" that organizes our understanding of the world, how do we distinguish it from any other categorization. How, for example, is a metacategorization like organization theory, which might seek to resolve otherwise incompatible differences between political machines and businesses, to be distinguished from the metacategorization of leopards as Christians (as his example of the Dorze of the Rift Valley explains), which resolves their alimentary habits with assigned human traits? Perhaps this is his point. Welp, there are twenty pages and dinner to go before we all find out. (I know you're on the edge of your seat, but try to contain yourself.)

2005-08-02, Tuesday 7:29pm

So it's been a good couple of days. Yesterday I went to Athens Cafe for a frappe and late afternoon reading (Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism, more below) followed by beer and kolbasa at the Bohemia Beer Garden with Dave G and company. Proper summer fare all around.

After some interpersonal adjustments, working with Sumila is developing its own rhythm and taking form. We're starting to make progress...even if it is just the first cut.

Best of all, I sat down with Peter yesterday to ask for his history of neo-Marxism and planning. I think I wound up talking more than listening, but he's wonderfully indulgent. Told him (as I tell everyone these days) that I've been "having epistemological issues", which is true, because of "his father and his buddies". He smiled...either because he was happy to hear it or thought my personal manner of referring to such mammoths as Adorno and Horkheimer. Anyway, it always feels good to speak with Peter since he understands where I'm coming from better than I do and it makes me feel like I'm not going too far over the edge.

At one point, I was telling him that I'd be interested in discussing readings that referred to the simultaneous isolation and integration demanded by capitalist organization that I've been thinking about lately and included in my exam. He said, "David Harvey would call that dialectical thinking." Another sign I'm going in the right direction. It's totally from reading Lefebvre with him last fall.

But enough of this grocery list of things that are making me feel good lately. More important is the following. Reading Sperber is part of a new branch of thought (another side track?). Last semester I was struck by Frank Fischer's brief discussion of symbols and political process in Reframing Public Policy (pp. 59-64). He writes that just as policy makers with different agendas can agree on a similar policy for different reasons, the ambiguity of symbols can similarly bring differing parties together. It's really quite obvious when you think about something like the WTC attack, the horrific symbolism of which has mobilized not only opposing parties in the U.S. but also many adherents of radical Islam. It has in a sense brought radical Islam and radical Christianity together into a policy of Armageddon. It also seems clear that unification through symbolism can be applied at any level of politics, and thus has appications to planning. Can/do planners use symbolic elements to promote their plans?

But what is a symbol? Sperber argues that symbolicity is a conceptual representation that interprets acts, words, gestures, or objects when those things cannot be resolved into existing categories. "A representation is symoblic precisely to the extent that it is not entirely explicable, that is to say, expressible by semantic means" (p113). Basically he is arguing that the efforts of anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists to translate symbols into a semiotic code, while not useless, misunderstand the nature of symbols in that symbols will ever evade semiotic fixation. Very exciting stuff. But I was just trying to find an explanation for how "The lion as "king of the jungle" becomes a symbol" and came up empty. Obviously there is more study to do.

To return to the laundry list for a moment, though. In the midst of our talk, Peter told me, "You know, you can do a political economy dissertation, too." I responded that, "Of course I'm going to." But afterward, I realized that I didn't really catch his meaning. There's no question that my dissertation will be informed by political economy, but what does it mean "to write a political economy dissertation"?

2005-07-28, Thursday 8:16am

Go figure. The test finishes and my contributions grow even more slim.

The test went adequately. I experimented with the isolation/integration contradiction with a modicum of success. They fed my question straight back to me, which sucked because I didn't have a good answer. I'm fairly confident that my answers will be acceptable, but there's always a possibility.

After a long, alcohol-saturated night, I spent the day reorganizing my bookshelves--both because they needed it and because my brain couldn't really have handled much more. Those 32 hours require unprecedented amounts of concentration and focus. And then work for Sumila kicked in. That's eating into my personal reading ambitions, but will be useful in the long run.

Also, after Genia's delightful (if brief) visit, which included a round at Bowlmor, I headed up on an early bus to the folks' place for two days to hang with the neices (Jordan's birthday) and my grandfather. Surprisingly refreshing and pleasant trip. Swam all day sunday, went hiking in the woods with the girls on monday. Serious safari action.

Okay, I just read an article that says that the US (through USAID) is now trying to impose moral positions on recipient countries. In exchange for $40m in aid for Brasil's AIDS prevention program, the US is requiring that the Brasilian government officially denounce prostitution. First of all, the director of the program, explaining the Brasilian government's refusal to accept the deal, said, "We must remain faithful to the established principles of the scientific method and not allow theological beliefs and dogma to interfere." Damn right! Second of all, it's messed up that the US would seek to impose its own standards on a program that by all accounts is the world's most successful; indeed, it's much better than the US program. Third, it's obscene of the US to impose its moral standards on another country (and this includes democracy as moral norm), but then again, politics is at its root an expression of morality.

2005-07-17, Sunday 5:03pm

My thoughts are not clear now, but I will share one or two before my final hours of study. I just finished chapter one of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which (for me) is vital to planning theory. Why? Because the very concept of planning is tied into the Enlightenment idea that we can improve our lot through science. Though fissures have appeared since the 1970s, mainstream planning persists in believing that we can sufficiently understand our world, the unnameable nature that is our world, that we can predict the outcome of (planning) decisions made today. This is particularly the case for infrastructure planning but is also clearly present in the idea of environmental impact statements, which purport to predict likely social and economic--in addition to physical--outcomes of planning proposals.

Adorno and Horkheimer claim that the Enlightenment is as dependent on mythology as the demons and spirits it purports to exorcise. If I understand correctly (and I may very well not), while prehistory mythologies animated objects into subjects, Enlightenment thinking objectifies the subject. While mythology celebrates or confronts the uniqueness of all encountered in nature, the Enlightenment presumes that nature is a unitary whole embodied in logico-mathematical truth that obliterates individuality under the fury of its relentless measures. This, they suggest, is the essence of the Enlightenment as bourgeois science, usurping the power of gods and kings to enthrall the proletariat under the domination capitalist, logical abstraction.

To illustrate how this choice enslaves the master as well, they employ the episode in which Odysseus encounters the Sirens (Book XII). The Sirens know the past and the future and seek to lure men of the present to their death, which is the death of the I in the other (cf. Eros and Civilization) . Following Circe's advice, two ways of escaping the loss of selfhood. The first is that taken by the laboring, rowing proletariat: stuffing their ears with wax that they might not hear the alluring song. The second is that which the commander adopts: he is bound tightly to the vehicle that he may hear but not escape.

Images of false consciousness should be beckoning from the corners of your mind, dear reader, as should echoes of my previous questions about the role of isolation in the modernist (= Enlightenment) project. Reading how wax was stuffed into their ears to keep the laborers serving progress evoked the obvious modern counterpart: the personal music player. Have we become an iPod proletariat? Are we simply plugging our ears with the wax (as in, "put it on wax") of our own choosing so that the repetition of the work cycle doesn't lure us into a sense of selflessness

2005-07-15, Friday 3:02pm

I probably shouldn't be writing this, but since it relates to my studies, I thought I'd pass it on. I've been thinking quite a bit lately about way in which isolation is fundamental to capitalism (or at least the general concept has passed frequently through my brain). It is easy to see in the free market ideology of neoclassical economics: each individual should be free to pursue their own preferences and the subsequent market will provide the greatest overall utility. If things worked this way and the concept of utility maximization itself weren't faulty), such isolation might not be so dangerous. But in a world of conflict settled too often by force, it is this very isolation that reduces individuals' abilities to counteract the negative impacts decisions made by strong market players. Does the isolation of the individual through media consumption (including the Internet), the division of labor, a political climate of fear, generalized consumption, and the effort to consume our way to uniqueness only further capitalism's bubble blowing expansion? Is capitalism simply a big bubble? Simmel provides a first step in this exploration.

Let me try to restate this since it doesn't seem clear to me (either). The question is: What is the role of isolation in the modernist (= capitalist) project? We know that in production it plays a critical role in increasing efficiency. Since Adam Smith's needle factory, we have believed that the division of labor into specialized functions increases efficiency. In consumption, it's not quite so clear. Certainly, isolated customers provide a greater degree of control over pricing for producers. Baudrillard, who I talked about on 6-03-05, writes that gushing floods of media drive individuals into isolation due both to the overwhelming quantity of information to consume and to an evasion of having to share too much personal information (an expression of the isolation Simmel describes). DeBord also discusses isolation under conditions of mass media. Jameson goes on to claim that "autonomization" (the achievement of autonomy by entities that were once components of a whole) is at the heart of modernism and can be extended to the postmodern.

More fundamentally, competition requires isolation. In From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism, Harvey refers to Marx's statement that competition is the "bearer" of capitalist social relations in any society dominated by the circulation of capital.

Currently, the Bush administration (on behalf of its big business buddies) would like to transform social security into individual payments. Health care and pensions have already gone that way. Working patterns have become more flexible and unique.

And yet, the Republicans have newfound power in associative unity. Firms are increasingly networked to reduce isolation in a highly unstable, changing environment. So association also has a role to play. Perhaps I need to take another look at Weber...

Well, that more clearly lays out some of the pieces of the research.

2005-07-14, Thursday 12:45pm

Four days to go.

2005-07-04, Monday 7:51pm

Still working like a banshee. I spent the last three days glued to my computer from rising in the morning to well past my bedtime at night to format the Nairobi survey data in R, which is amazing, so that I do not have to spend my time cutting and pasting. After well over 36 hours of work, I came up with a table of weighted means broken down by different categories. Not much to look at, but certainly the start of greater things. I learned a load. Unfortunately, it came at a time where I should be doing some very different things, like studying, which I am doing except for this little break induced by the fact that I have to upload some materials for my study partners.

All this craziness, which has been taken out on Y2K who is being an angel, really, is due to the fact that the new prof needs material fast and because I'm going away for four and a half days from wednesday for the now traditional summer slog out to the Cape. Hopefully, I'll be able to relax and enjoy myself and those with me. Must think about the summer movie.

2005-06-26, Sunday 10:25am

No time for much, but in preparation I have been reading some papers (PiPs) by Peter Marcuse from 1976-1980 that I rescued from a straight trip to the incinerator. The exciting thing is that they provide (for me) a great window on how planning theory was changing during the 1970s from strong Marxist theory to a more nuanced, Marxist social theory-informed view. Plus, they're fantastic critiques of the NYC, "Ford to City: Drop Dead" fiscal crisis, claiming that the fiscal crisis was created by private capital in a struggle to recapture benefits lost during the 1960s. For those interested, the department secretary is currently scanning these documents into pdf form for future online access.

2005-06-20, Monday 5:04pm

No time for anything but work. Everything is under crunch control. I don't go out anymore...ever...with anyone. I have, however, started jogging again, which (I think) feels good. And I'm working hard to resist buying a graph theory book. Oh, and after a week of sloooowwwww downloading, I've finally received all four gigs of the James Brown show on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Powerful show. Now I've got to find an opportunity to watch.

2005-06-13, Monday 2:12pm

I may just have eaten one of the healthiest meals I've had in years...well, maybe not, but it was a combination that would make the FDA proud: small hamburger on slices of my favorite bakery's Tuscany Peasant loaf and topped by blue cheese and assorted greens, plus cucumbers drenched in their own juices and lemon and basil, plus asparagus topped by asiago, accompanied by filtered water with fresh lemon juice squeezed in, and all followed by a banana for dessert.

A quick correction. Apparently it is not Gary who visits but Aaron, who must be trolling for metro news...or seeking confirmation that he's glad he's not in my shoes. Welcome, Aaron, welcome.

So the real excitement around here (for me) is that my computer audio world is pretty much fully pimped out now. As mentioned, fb2k is going strong (incredible quality, never going back), but in one of the forums I was directed to the kX project, which produces an alternative driver for my soundcard. The driver is outstanding: control and tweakability beyond my ken. They both take tweaking beyond most people's interests, but when all your music is coming through your computer, it's worth the extra attention.

And to juice all this up, I've also been introduced to two fantastic live recording torrent sites: Dimeadozen and The Trader's Den. Of course, they mostly have rock, but there's a steady flow of blues, funk, soul, and jazz that simply delights. The thing that amazes me is how unaware I was of the opportunity and yet how it makes perfect sense. Back in the day, you traded cassette tapes dubbed from cassette tapes dubbed from cassette tapes dubbed times over. So why bother? But now you've got (near) perfect soundboard recordings transferred to lossless audio. Ahhhh, it's just glorious. Meters (1975), Prince (1985), Muddy Waters (1974), John Lee Hooker (1976), the Clash (1982), Clifford Brown (1950), Miles (1971). Oh, joy.

2005-06-08, Wednesday 11:48pm

Perhaps this is how you know I'm coming back! Papa's got a brand new bag!

I'm incredibly warmed by the involvement of our planning program's alumni. Apparently some of them actually visit this site (Hi, Gary) and saw the horrible news. But the encouraging thing is that everyone is ready to take action...within their means. It's completely heartening to know that people care enough about the future of the program and their successors to voice their concerns to the Dean. it's beautiful.

In personal good news from within the program, the new prof asked me to help her do some statistical research for a paper she's writing for the Bank (that is, the World Bank, capital 'B'). I know the primary motivation is that she's overwhelmed and needs to spread out her work load, but I'm also confident that it's a gesture designed to start a longer term working relationship between us, which I'm looking forward to.

However, while I may be coming back, other wonderful things are holding me back. My bittorrent world is coming to maturity...as is my technological world. Over the last tow days, I have made my first digital copies of the first two "A-" LPs in my collection: Cannonball Adderley Quintet, The Black Messiah, and Nat Adderley, Work Song. I even went further and contributed the first to the torrent, since it's out of print. In response to comments from eager consumers (the Adderleys kick serious ass), I did more research on audio codecs. This will prove handy for my archiving (Once I record these things, I'm going to keep good copies so I never have to do it again.), but it also led me to the music player of the future, foobar2000. People claim that it has superior sound production, but what appeals to me is that all of the internal are open to manipulation and the data is stored in a more or less universal format. No more being trapped by Windows or Apple proprietary technology (except the OS...for now). No more accepting the given colors and fonts. It takes more attention to organize features at first, but that's like any powerful machine. It has opened up the guts of music organizing to reveal its glorious pulsing vitality. Foobar is the future. It is the Firefox of music players. And it has distracted me from all the things I should be doing.

2005-06-06, Monday 1:08pm

I'm in shock. I can barely think. I must speak. I've denied and now I'm getting angry. Soon I'll probably be laughing in despair. I just heard news that Susan Fainstein is going to leave our department for Harvard's after the coming year. I've also heard that Peter is going to officially go soon, too. Although I have a great deal of respect for the other faculty, our department is going to be devastated. Eviscerated. Disemboweled and left in a gutter to bleed.

The only senior person we'll have is distracted by other projects and has to be careful of his health. The thing that really bites my ass is that I have been selling the program based on the idea that it has been steadily improving and that Susan has catapulted us to new heights. Now I feel like I've been selling others (and myself) a lie. Unless a miracle happens, we're just going to plummet back into the dark abyss of chaos. I guess I feel a bit betrayed because I feel I've put so much work into strengthening the program--and have been rewarded to date--but that now it'll all have been for naught.

Who can save us now? Ebichuman, where are you?

2005-06-03, Friday 3:06pm

I guess it would be remiss to skip my weekly update, so I'll throw something down before I say "So what?" (quoting Mr. Warhol) and go off to catch a needed nap. I've been up late and early this week going through what Y2K calls my summer ritual: reformatting the hard drives and rebuilding the computer's functions from scratch (reinstall OS and programs, make customization tweaks, etc.). I have come to believe that she is right and that it has indeed become a summer ritual. Since I spend so much of life with this damned (wonderful) thing (It's always within arm's reach even if I'm doing something else.), it's a way of purging the crap that has accumulated in "my system". Old files, dll conflicts, updates, uninstalls and installs, all that). I just say, "Fuck it!" and clean house. It's kind of a hassle, but it does feel good (for a time) at the end.

Last Saturday my sister and her family came down for the Red Sox / Yankee's game (RS: 17, Y: 1). Imagine how cute this was. One neice in a Red Sox jersey and the other in a Yankees jersey, a veritable advertisement for peace on earth. Anyway, afterward we went to Mars 2112, a wholesale ripoff experience. However, Brad, who came with us, brought his camera and had the girls making "alien" pictures of themselves.

Stray reading this week, as discrete mathematics has become much more mathematic, is Jean Baudrillard's In the shadow of the silent majorities. It talks of the silent majority as a force that cannot be mobilized as politicians, advertisers, and socialists would have them but rather as an absorptive nothingness that accepts all and returns nothing, an implosion of the social.

And, well, "my system" will implode if I don't sneak an afternoon nap in NOW.

And, oh, yeah, new project is to make some DVDs. Ebichu, that bizarre little japanese cartoon, will be my first target as a gift for the sister-in-law.

2005-05-27, Friday 4:14pm

My frequency is dropping. Considering how little I've gotten done on Susan's paper (yeah, I know, whining about it again!), there should be a lot more up here. This week my productivity has been hampered by two things: DK's apartment and bit torrent. DK's apartment took three more nights of work...and still there is the bedroom to do. Really good fun. The second thing was finally getting bit torrent up and working. It took a lot of fiddling, but it all seems to be cranking along nicely now. It's a whole new world of internet interconnectedness. Used it to download the Gentoo universal CD, despite Y2K's warning and my own understanding of why she voiced it.

Anyway, two thoughts that have been on my mind this week. The first has been Russell's Paradox. The basic idea is the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. Thus, if the set contains itself, it does not belong to its set, and if the set does not contain itself, it belongs to its set. I may be jumping over the gun on this, but it makes me think of the inherent limitations of knowledge. I'm no logician, but to me it implies that we cannot define the true set of all there is (the universal discourse) and are stuck within our own knowledge constructs. Not a new idea, but to have it captured in a logical statement is pretty cool. I have a feeling this discrete mathematics class is going to generate deep reverberations in my world view.

The second idea, which cropped up this morning and further delayed my paper for Susan, is an example of potential repercussions of set theory on my thinking. I started to think how one would logically describe a hierarchy. Do you treat management as the broadest set of control relations or do you view it as one set of relations within a larger set? For instance, in a company does management contain all other aspects of the business, or does it merely influence the actions of the other departments? or can one conceive of it both ways? other ways?

2005-05-20, Friday 10:51am

My 9am to 6pm dedication seems to running into teething difficulties. Out late a couple of nights in a row, once drinking and once painting a friend's apartment, has got me moving only at 11am here today and not moving much at all yesterday. But Brad and I did go over to DK's place to help him paint his recently acquired apartment. It was delightfully fun "man's work".

But that's not why I'm writing. I'm writing because of the unbelievably high grade I got in Multivariate Political Analysis. There I was thinking I was failing (and indeed had received the worst grade I've ever received on my midterm), and then I came out with a grade that must put me ahead of most everyone else...or everyone got the same grade. I was genuinely expecting a B. So that's a pleasing start to the day.

As to my computer parts purchases... In an effort to maintain my current system at an acceptably high performing level (love you, system, don't turn your back on me now), I decided to purchase a DVD burner and some internal hard disk space. I've realized that I paid extra for a RAID 0 setup to make memory access faster but never added a second disk drive, rendering the extra original expense useless. I almost dropped $650 to make it happen, but then I turned to EBay and again did it for a tenth of the price. No guarantee, but an affordable tenth of the price.

Of course, I can install anything until I finish my paper for Susan (my rule). But when I do, I have decided to try Linux again (on a dual boot). The future is there. The present is a twilight zone, but the future is there. Almost all the programs and features I need are available for Linux, or soon to be so. And it's all free. No more illegally copying disks and waiting for beneficent friends to shop for me in Thailand. And since I'm going to take another step toward computer savviness with some Java programming, it can only help in the long run.

What is really more exciting is that my seeming detour into system theory may turn out to be the biggest boon in the end. I've discovered that an outgrowth of system theory, operations research, is used for large firms to organize production. Operations research seems to employ the same basic framework of analysis to make production and location decisions that I intend to employ to analyze the aggregate pattern of these production and investment decisions. Thus, my methodology may turn out to be the best way to analyze these larger patterns. It's very exciting in a sociology of knowledge type of way.

2005-05-17, Tuesday 1:47pm

Since previously unknown individuals have sought to encourage me and lovely (House of) Lovers have sent new quotes for the site to inspire me, I thought I should update this page.

I met with Josh and Lei today and hatched the idea of putting together a working group on industry and regions for the fall. I'm very excited and have already put together a placeholder website. It could become a solid place to really discuss issues with other interested people. It will be a very good thing.

I have repromised my lit review to Susan for Friday (after temporarily suspending indefinitely), so I've got to get back to work. I've also got to get back to work because I'm implementing a 9am-6pm workday for myself. During these hours I should focus on activities that contribute directly to my most concrete goals and requirements (exercise is also acceptable). Outside of that time, I'm free to study other things (like Java), to play, to drink, to watch movies or tv, to make movies or tv, or whatever. I hope it will help me focus and be productive. And I think it already is somewhat successful.

So gotta go. News about my computer parts purchases coming soon. I'm sure you can't wait!

2005-05-10, Tuesday 9:18am

I feel pretty lame and unproductive. Even though I only took three classes, I'm getting an incomplete in the most important one, colloquium. Susan was kind enough not to hassle me. The bothersome aspect is that I don't have a really good reason. Other people were as busy or busier than I and still managed to get their work done. My topic is huge and I had to do a lot of reading, but I still could have written something to hand in on time. No, I'm afraid after five years of classes, I've just lost my patience with semester deadlines and am not taking them seriously enough to damage my health by staying up late, avoiding any semblance of a social life, and just cramming the reading into my head. I've got a career to go. If I make learning distasteful now, what will happen later? And though this is surely right, what signal does it broadcast? My credibility is dropping.

In other news, I've been asked to learn TransCAD so that I can make a transportation map of Nairobi. The excuse is that I'll be able to learn some modelling, but I'm a bit concerned that I'll be doing mindless labor that won't really serve any of my own ends. Regardless, it seems that everything is pointing back to modelling these days, so I'm going to roll with it (for the most part). Thus, since Linux has dropped off my immediate horizon (My laptop isn't particularly compatible because Trident won't share its specs with open source folks.), I'm now reviving an interest in Java. Where will it all lead?

Anyway, two links. One will change the web. One is just cool. The cool one is a java applet on The History of Sampling. Click on a sampled record and find out who has sampled it. Click on a record with sampling and find out who is sampled. The one that will slowly change the internet is greasemonkey. It allows you to redesign someone else's webpage. So, now not only can you block html ads, you can choose to replace them with other ads or combine two pages on one. Reclaim your desktop.

2005-05-07, Friday 10:21am

I should be working on my lit review, but I allowed myself to become distracted by a NYTimes article on the current Kansas school board debate over the inclusion of Intelligent Design (ID) in biology textbooks. To get a better sense of what the "scientific" arguments are, I read an article by Harris and Calvert, a biochemist and a lawyer cum geologist. I agree with them on only one thing. The rest is an abuse of logic.

They claim that there are only three ways to explain the existence of objects and patterns: chance, law, and design. Their goal is to scientifically evaluate whether the existence of apparent design can be explained by these three components. This is all well and good, but they abuse each concept. First, chance is dealt with by claiming that existing, complex patterns have some infinitesimal chance of occurring spontaneously. There are two basic problems. One is that the cut-off for the odds of something being "impossible" is based on a loose, off-the-cuff, back-of-an-envelope calculation by an ID sympathizer. The other is more damning in my opinion. By looking only at the statistical possibility of a complex organization coming into being all at once, the odds calculated do not take into account the much better odds that minor changes will occur in the evolutionary process and build towardexisting complexity.

Then, when they discuss "law" (after all, they have a legal expert), they treat it as dictating that something "has" to be a certain way. They also invoke the idea that laws describe regularities. The problem is that they evaluate law at the wrong level. There is no "law" that dictates that we "must" have two eyes rather than eight, therefore we must infer design. There is no recognition that laws operate at a much more fundamental level that provides the channel for the flowing course of complexity.

Finally, they claim that if a pattern has "meaning", then we can infer design. To make this argument, they are forced to resurrect arguments of a divine watchmaker from William Paley and the pre-Darwinian writers of his time (early 1800s). (Note that if we must reverse the clock of science back this far, we must also erase genetics, subatomic particles, relativity, and other fundamental building blocks of contemporary science.) The basic idea is that because we can infer that some obviously manmade object has been designed, we can make the same leap about the complexity and appearance of design we encounter daily. One example they use is that of DNA and the fact that its meaning lies in its ability to reproduce itself. Another is that letters that form words (patterns) have meaning. The problem is that all of this semantic meaning is attributed by our minds, not by some objective force or intelligence. Meaning is socially constructed.

There is one significant point on which I agree with Calvert and Harris. They claim that acceptance of a naturalistic view of evolution and the universe implies that existence is purposeless, that it has no meaning. Meanwhile, ID implies that there is a purpose to life, a reason to live, and, as (revealingly) claimed in their conclusion, no moral reason not to get divorced, not to have an abortion, not to kill and maim. And they're right. There is no meaning. There is no purpose. Only weak minds that refuse to come to terms with this reality that must turn to concepts of God. God provides a psychological mechanism for avoiding the complexity of moral decisions and for fending off potentially destabilizing uncertainty.

And this helps explain why almost 50% of Americans believe in creationism. Not ID, but creationism. This is how I know that there is no intelligent designer out there.

2005-05-05, Wednesday 9:06am

After all my nonchalance born of suppressing the pressures of "The End", all shreds of self-illusion have been blasted away. I am now officially in freak out mode.

2005-05-04, Wednesday 9:54am

I finally saw Boozy on its reopening night. It was a fun romp through New York City urban planning history. The underlying debate is between the vision of the genius and the mediocrity of democratic compromise (in city building). Definitely worth seeing if you're a planner, urban designer, or architect.

The missus has probably just landed and is about to disembark. Still have a little cleaning and straightening to do. The worst thing is that wihtin about fifteen minutes of her probable return, I will have to leave for class.

Too late. She's back.

2005-04-30, Saturday 9:49am

It's coming down to the wire, but somehow I'm regaining my confidence. Though it did take me an extra day to finish my take home exam for Bill Easterly's class on African development, which was better in retrospect than in practice, I finished it competently last night (three days early) and submitted it. So that one is out of my hair. I also have newfound faith that my stats exam is going to happen after the 8th, which will leave me all this week to write my paper for Susan...if I am successful in grading term papers today and tomorrow. And I will be.

But more interesting to me at the moment is www.ubu.com, which I just learned about in the NYTimes. It's a repository of avante garde art, mainly poetry and film it seems. So much interesting stuff. I'm now downloading (for later viewing) Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, a film based around the book of the same name. Very excited. Time to go book shopping again!

2005-04-25, Monday 5:59pm

I found out today that my name an info was on that laptop stolen from an office at UC Berkeley. Spent a couple of hours learning how to protect my identity. Pretty fucking thrilled about that. After all the precautions I take at home to maintain my computer privacy and whatnot, I become vulnerable because of someone else's neglect.

And now I go and spill a glass of water on my tuner in my upset.

And I'm coming down with a little cold

And Yoonkyung has run off to Buenos Aires--before I've even had a chance to go there--for a week and a half.

I'll probably burn my pizza tonight, too.

2005-04-19, Tuesday 10:08pm

I apologize for near laziness here, but below please find an exchange between myself and an economics graduate student over the economics of striking. It began after he called a move to relocate a student government meeting off campus "petulant and ineffective". I responded by saying that though I was unsure of the precise logic for the call to action, I had forfeited my right to question it by not participating in the organizing and that solidarity demanded that I provide my support. In a personal p.s. to him, I suggested he think of it as a collective action problem.

- His response:

I appreciate the personal post-script :) I'm not really a supporter of unionization, but given unionizers' goals, I actually think that boycotting campus events seems counterproductive. The university couldn't care less where GSAC meets, for example, but they do care very much about our duties as TAs. Hence I understand the motivation behind the teaching strike, but not around the rest of it. All this said, I think your approach of obeying the collective decision does actually make sense. I just disagree with the original decision itself.

- I responded by trying to play sociology off against economics:

Frankly, I'm not particularly thrilled by that decision either, nor about boycotting classes. And mostly I'm a defender of the right to organize rather than a supporter of this specific union. I understand that economists as a whole are not particularly inclined toward unionization--and I see the point--but once you introduce elements of power into the production relationship, it starts to make much more sense to me.

- He countered with a well-reasoned but purely economic argument:

My confusion is that I always understood the right to organize as deriving from the need to grant power to employees whose employers essentially have monopoly power over them (i.e. workers in a one-industry town or low-skill workers who have few options). If employers don't have monopoly power, then workers themselves have the power to switch to a better job. Competition (in theory) should thus drive employers to attempt to retain workers.

Columbia is a far cry from such a situation. Every graduate student who came here had many other choices in life, whether to attend other graduate schools or not to attend graduate school at all. Every one of us knew what we were getting into when we signed up. I don't think Columbia has exactly sprung any horrible surprises on students. Many of us get health insurance, many of us get stipends, we get access to an exclusive housing market, and all for a price we knew we'd pay: teaching some number of classes and possibly some other duties. To turn around and tell Columbia that this isn't good enough seems strange.

Also, there's no need for unionization here to put pressure on the administration. The easiest way to do that is to threaten to discourage talented prospective graduate students from coming. The university will be much more sensitive about that. We could turn to our advantage Columbia's need to compete for those students and I think it would scare the university much more than attempting to become a legal entity that the federal government has already declared can not exist.

- So I thought I'd explore the economic rationale behind striking a little further:

Good points. It's good to think this through, because I can't claim to have thought it through thoroughly from the economics standpoint.

But first, let me touch on the last point about the federal government. In 2000 the National Labor Relations Board (presumably democratically controlled) ruled that we DID HAVE the right to organize. It was only this past summer that the now Republican-controlled NLRB overturned that decision along party lines. So it's not entirely clear here.

So back to the theoretical issue. The issue of (consumer) choice is the one I find hardest to counter. I think there is arguably an asymmetric information problem here. Students don't have complete information about the cost they will incur (or incorrectly estimate it). By the time many realize the cost, the sunk costs may be so high (opportunity costs, life decisions, etc.) and ongoing variable costs low enough that it is not cost-effective to cancel the contract.

And this, I think, goes to the nature of the monopoly power the university does have. Once you're in, exit is extremely costly. I don't think the university/grad student market is particularly competitive (in the broad sense). If we could do one year then switch to Yale or NYU or Hofstra the next and then back again, the competitive market would be a reality, but in practice I don't think it works that way.

And I think some departments have it much worse than others. I, personally, have been well treated and have no complaints against my department (despite the measly stipend our department used to offer). However, I understand that conditions in other departments (specifically history and I think sociology) are not as palatable. The university/department limits our stipends to four (or five) years to encourage us to complete our degrees in a timely manner, but if the workload they place upon us in the meantime is so large that it prohibits us from completing our degree in time, we have a problem. I believe this is the case in some departments. (But I should have more concrete details before making this case too strongly.)

Interestingly, your point about discouraging students from coming here (while that would undermine the value of our own degrees) seems to be the administration's main public rhetoric around the significant rises in stipends over the last several years (though those rises are highly correlated with unionization activity). They argue that they have done so to attract the most qualified students. And, now it suddenly strikes me, one could view the strike as a way of signalling to potential students that conditions may not be what they hope. Perhaps unionization is threatening to discourage talented prospects.

look forward to your thoughts.

- I haven't heard back from him yet, but I do feel better about striking.

2005-04-15, Friday 9:23am

People, I regret to inform you that the American population is in grave danger. I was just alerted (Jon Carroll via metafilter.com) to the following communique from a clearly frightening terrorist cell. Please be careful.

------------

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary.

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States! Too long has your attention been waylaid by the bright baubles of extremist thought. Too long have fundamentalist yahoos of all religions (except Buddhism -- 14-5 vote, no abstentions, fundamentalism subcommittee) made your head hurt. Too long have you been buffeted by angry people who think that God talks to them. You have a right to your moderation! You have the power to be calm! We will use the IED of truth to explode the SUV of dogmatic expression!

People of the United States, why is everyone yelling at you??? Whatever happened to ... you know, everything? Why is the news dominated by nutballs saying that the Ten Commandments have to be tattooed inside the eyelids of every American, or that Allah has told them to kill Americans in order to rid the world of Satan, or that Yahweh has instructed them to go live wherever they feel like, or that Shiva thinks bombing mosques is a great idea? Sister Immaculate Dagger of Peace notes for the record that we mean no disrespect to Jews, Muslims, Christians or Hindus. Referred back to the committee of the whole for further discussion.

We are Unitarian Jihad. We are everywhere. We have not been born again, nor have we sworn a blood oath. We do not think that God cares what we read, what we eat or whom we sleep with. Brother Neutron Bomb of Serenity notes for the record that he does not have a moral code but is nevertheless a good person, and Unexalted Leader Garrote of Forgiveness stipulates that Brother Neutron Bomb of Serenity is a good person, and this is to be reflected in the minutes.

Beware! Unless you people shut up and begin acting like grown-ups with brains enough to understand the difference between political belief and personal faith, the Unitarian Jihad will begin a series of terrorist-like actions. We will take over television studios, kidnap so-called commentators and broadcast calm, well-reasoned discussions of the issues of the day. We will not try for "balance" by hiring fruitcakes; we will try for balance by hiring non-ideologues who have carefully thought through the issues.

We are Unitarian Jihad. We will appear in public places and require people to shake hands with each other. (Sister Hand Grenade of Love suggested that we institute a terror regime of mandatory hugging, but her motion was not formally introduced because of lack of a quorum.) We will require all lobbyists, spokesmen and campaign managers to dress like trout in public. Televangelists will be forced to take jobs as Xerox repair specialists. Demagogues of all stripes will be required to read Proust out loud in prisons.

We are Unitarian Jihad, and our motto is: "Sincerity is not enough." We have heard from enough sincere people to last a lifetime already. Just because you believe it's true doesn't make it true. Just because your motives are pure doesn't mean you are not doing harm. Get a dog, or comfort someone in a nursing home, or just feed the birds in the park. Play basketball. Lighten up. The world is not out to get you, except in the sense that the world is out to get everyone.

Brother Gatling Gun of Patience notes that he's pretty sure the world is out to get him because everyone laughs when he says he is a Unitarian. There were murmurs of assent around the room, and someone suggested that we buy some Congress members and really stick it to the Baptists. But this was deemed against Revolutionary Principles, and Brother Gatling Gun of Patience was remanded to the Sunday Flowers and Banners committee.

People of the United States! We are Unitarian Jihad! We can strike without warning. Pockets of reasonableness and harmony will appear as if from nowhere! Nice people will run the government again! There will be coffee and cookies in the Gandhi Room after the revolution.

2005-04-14, Thursday 8:03am

Now I've a week and a half to get back on top of my world. Next week GSEU strikes, which for me means defending the right to organize against a conservative overthrow of already granted rights. Between striking, I have to finally write my lit review, so that I am prepared to face the onslaught of twenty fifteen-page papers for grading and other end of the semester responsibilities.

2005-04-08, Friday 8:50pm

Just want to try out my new five-word dissertation topic: distributive impacts of technological and organizational change. What is not clearly mentioned and perhaps will force me to limit the scope of my research further is that these changes and impacts take place within the context of the world network of cities and are contingent on the choices of individuals restricted by bounded rationality.

2005-04-08, Friday 8:50am

James Howard Kunstler claims that we are passing the oil production peak and will now become feuding Hatfield and McCoy local farmers. I think his economics are a bit off. He seems to have no sense of economies of scale.

2005-04-04, Monday 9:25am

Yesterday was a day of firsts and lasts. It was the first day of the baseball season. It was the first day that two perfect game pitchers faced off against one another (not that I really cared). And it was the first time I ever went to a full on sports bar. And I didn't go to just any sports bar, I went to ESPNZone in Times Square. For sports, the place was fine. We had a great view of the projection tv (for some reason in stretched, deforming widescreen mode rather than normal mode). The bar staff were overworked but friendly. But the food. Ugh! It was overpriced, and crappy. In fact, it tasted just like the food you'd get at a stadium...with prices to match. That in itself is fine; it adds to the general atmosphere (even if in a completely lame way). But in the middle of the night, the food revisited. The gurgling deep in the intestinal tract began, making every effort to spreadout to both ends of my digestive tract. For an hour or two in the middle of the night, I drifted from dozing to dedigesting. That is the last time I will go to ESPNZone. People, stick to your neighborhood sports bar.

2005-04-02, Saturday 10:00am

Of course, this is an example of a new, virtually unprovable idea--more a pattern really--being seen everywhere, but what the heck. The NYTimes reports today that DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon, has officially acknowledged its cut back on "blue sky" computer science research in the name of home security in favor of developing technologies with more immediate payoff. This apparently parallels a decline in similar funding from corporate sources as well. If we are to imagine that we are at the bottom of a Kondratieff wave, it fits in perfectly. On the downslide there is massive investment in technology research, and on the upswing these technologies are more concretely applied. I know there's little basis for believing the fit, but it is novel.

By the way, Gregory Bateson rocks. His name came up yet again (and not once but twice) in a lecture by Marshall Sahlins I went to the other day, where he tried to explain how microevents can be structurally amplified and take place in macrohistories if their characteristics are appropriate, e.g. Elian Gonzalez from Cuba.

2005-03-31, Thursday 10:42pm

In an odd but pleasant twist, a virtual throwaway theoretical construct in my recent literature review outline may wind up providing a critical foundation for my eventual analysis. I had a disagreement with Susan Fainstein when I claimed that a general causal relationship running from technological change to organizational change to theoretical change could be called Schumpeterian because he believed that the primary driver of development was technology. She disagreed and was right in a sense. She said that Schumpeter argued that innovation was the driver of growth. And that it is...in the short run. In the long run, however, major shifts in technology induce long waves in the economy, which are much larger and significant for growth(?).

Though yet to be resolved, it has got me thinking about Kondratieff's long waves. These major technological shifts may very well play the primary role in restructuring economic organization which in turn restructures what I am now calling the planetary city system (since all the other good words are taken).

2005-03-28, Monday 8:47am

A rockin' collection of street art, the Wooster Collective. You can also visit the limbo fam.

2005-03-26, Saturday 11:14am

And I haven't taken a day off since...except to recover from too much alcohol. It's been a great week. Last Monday was a LiPs doubleheader with Ananya Roy in the morning and Margit Mayer in the afternoon. Both powerhouses and exciting to learn from. I also had the great pleasure of being invited out to dinner by Peter with Margit, her husband, and Neil Brenner. The whole day functioned to situate me within a group of scholars to which I feel I belong (or will belong). The discussion, particularly Ananya's, was reinforced by a colloquium session with Peter on Wednesday, in which we discussed his father's End of Utopia in relation to Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia.

Perhaps it's the artistic bent in me, but I'm increasingly drawn to the idea of how utopian visions can be employed to guide policymaking. The technical issue, which comes up clearly in the Marcuse piece, is that utopia, seemingly by definition, is not attainable. Yet there have been efforts made to realize them (think of the Shakers, the Oneida community, Owenites, and so forth), and I'm not convinced that a utopia must necessarily be unattainable. If an ideal arrangement is attainable, what should we call it? Can utopian visions provide guiding goals and charismatic mobilization for action?

The other development of the week, to which I must turn in moments, is the fact that ideas of scale, courtesy Neil Brenner, are becoming more prevalent in the way I'm thinking about my dissertation topic of the global city-region network and uneven development. One can easily conceive of uneven development at many different geographical and territorial scales, from the city to the globe. And the very issue of global city-regions invites the idea of scale into any contemporary analysis. I'm thinking now that the idea of scalar perceptions can be used to trace the development of the world city network from the hierarchical notions of location theory to the more horizontal organization of the space of flows. There seem to be two important bifurcations: one historical, one theoretical. The historical birfurcation occurs in the early 1970s and reflects the transition from nation state-based, Fordist production to globally networked, post-Fordist production. This economic transition is parallelled in the shift of city network theory from regional and national hierarchies to global networks of cities. However, within the theory pertaining to the global network of cities, I'm beginning to discern two strands. The first, characterized by Saskia Sassen's global cities analysis, maintains the hierarchical nature of previous analysis and focuses its lens on power relations. The second, implied in Scott et al's concept of the global city-region (and delineated by Sassen) and perhaps most fully embodied in Castell's space of flows, emphasizes the horizontal, integrated nature of global production relations.

And actually, there is one more event worth mentioning, the lecture I gave for Susan's planning theory course. Unfortunately, I was not as fully prepared as I would have liked to have been (I blame Peter for inviting me out to dinner the night before), but it seems to have gone over well. I have to admit that I do like playing to an audience, especially if they seem to be enjoying themselves. Of course, I was privileged to have an inordinate amount of unavoidable attention since I was introducing the elements of the thesis that they are going to have to write next year. But along those lines, I have met with several students to discuss potential thesis ideas, and it's such a pleasure. Exploring the potential of another's ideas and theories with them has to be one of life's most enjoyable experiences.

2005-03-16, Wednesday 8:39am

I took a day off! Rather pleasant, really. Yesterday morning I left the house at 10:30am and didn't come back until midnight. I visited Gregory Colbert's nomadic museum on Pier 54, which was acceptable but full of new age spiritual sounds and imagery. While some of the imagery was delightful, most of it left me cold and shivering in a breeze of artificial spirituality, processed enlightenment, and canned transcendence. Neat idea, though.

After that, we went to join the set of Emeril Live (show EM1128 or something about young and fresh spring foods). We couldn't see a thing from where we were sitting. I think I'm now more adamantly opposed to the guy's program than I ever was (except episode EM1128). Everything the guy cooked goes like this: add olive oil, salt and pepper, throw in garlic (applause...for some reason...I guess everyone just loves garlic), a dash of cayenne (more applause), kick it up a notch with "white gold" (truffle sauce), add some butter, et voila. Same recipe for every main ingredient.

The most curious component was the cameraman placed in front of us. The guy was greasy to start off with, but then he started trying to encourage audience verbal participation by purring "Oohhh, yeahhh, oh yeah, that's good, yeah." It was like being on a porn shoot...not that I've been on one. Business must be bad. If you can't whore sex, whore food.

2005-03-14, Monday 1:49pm

Today my passion for my work is blazing forth like the midday sun in the Sahara. I've spent the last couple of hours deconstructing my computer keyboard and mouse, cleaning each piece, each key, and reassembling them. The dirt that I had been shaking out of my keyboard and the discolorations around each key's edges has been bothering me for some time. And today--as I sit down to really bear down on my work--was the day. Now the keyboard is gleaming and glinting in the sun. My ability to engage my computer and "really write" is now assured.

Actually, it does look much nicer and the simple activity gave me a chance to reflect on some aspects of my thesis writing presentation for next Tuesday, so the effort is not as pointless as one might be inclined to think.

Far more importantly, though, it turns out that (unbeknownst to me) the NAACP has asked the ACSP not to hold its conference in South Carolina in protest of the state's refusal to take the confederate flag down from places of prominence on state buildings. I guess I'll be boycotting if the venue isn't changed.

2005-03-12, Saturday 7:04pm

Truly evil. I was feeling better yesterday: little coughing, no sore throat, no headache, all good-ish. But today I've been dragged back down into coughing, a headache, continued naps, somewhat stuffy sinuses. I knew I shouldn't get too optimistic too soon. This, of course, implies that viruses do mount a second attack. They've probably mutated enough to bypass my system for the moment. Come on white blood cells. Do your thing!

By the way, I watched both volumes of Kill Bill last night. I hadn't seen either before, so it was a rare treat. The more I think about the film, though, the more I like it. Some of the fighting seemed overdone and drawn out, but the stories and the character development riveted my attention (through the cold haze), the cinematography was often delightful, and I suspect that there is a built in tribute to the genre's history that I don't have the knowledge to appreciate and that might have explained some of the more awkward choices (like the sudden switch to black and white for the Crazy 88s fight). I approve.

2005-03-12, Saturday 9:22am

The New York Times reports that Joel C. Heitkamp, a North Dakota state senator, has proposed a law the would prohibit "power hours" by moving the legal drinking age to 8am on a person's 21st birthday. A power hour occurs when a newly 21-year-old walks into a bar at 12:01am on their birthday and tries to put down 21 drinks in the hour before bars legally close. "We want them to wake up in the morning and realize they have a whole day," he said, "and that they don't have to cram what most of us would consider an evening's activity into one hour." Does he really mean to imply that "most of us" consider 21 drinks appropriate for "an evening's activity"?

2005-03-09, Wednesday 8:45am

Evil. My system is completely unstable. One minute I'm hot; the next I'm cold. One minute good; the next bad. One minute solid; the next as though my insides were going to liquify and explode. There's only so long it can last, but it has already lasted too long.

One thing I have forgotten to mention is how sweet Yoonkyung has been in indulging my weakness and helping me out. Except, of course, that she ran off to a Knicks vs. the Washington whoevers (oh, Wizards) last night. But how can you blame her?

And March, as usual, is a bitch. I'm convinced that it's the worst month. Nobody thinks it should be winter, but it always insists on providing some. Gotta wait until after spring break.

2005-03-08, Tuesday 6:31pm

Even though I've given in, God is still persisting. Now that the weather has plummeted from the fresh, light assurances of spring to the deathly accusations of the dead of winter (snow, temperatures dropping to 20 tonight), it seems the furnace in my building is no longer working.

I can confidently say my theory section today was the worst ever. My fever decided to rear its ugly head just as things got started. So as the sweat was dripping down my back, I was struggling to come up with the questions and explanations that would engage the group. In addition, since Shane is in Australia, his section was split in half, upsetting whatever social balance we had established. While that kind of thing can be refreshing, it didn't work when I was not at my best and midterms had everyone functioning at a low. I hate midterms and finals. Thank god, they're almost over.

And now off to study for what will hopefully be my last.

Oops. Spoke too quickly. Furnace is back. God is great. God is good. Let us thank him for this...

2005-03-07, Monday 11:29am

OK, God, the Job joke's over. You got me. No sooner do I hop in the piping hot shower and appreciate its warmth--having decided that if I can't feel good, at least I can look good--than you turn off the hot water. Real cute. You got me. So you can come out from behind the set now and tell me that the cold, the pressure, the spread of the American Empire, HIV/AIDS, increasing income inequality, Bush II in the White House for a second term, all of it, you can just pop out now and tell me it's all a great big joke. "You're on Cosmic Candid Camera!"

2005-03-07, Monday 8:38am

Okay, just as I start to get a grip, a cold gets a grip on me. And my neighbors (wonderful people) decide to have a loud party on a Sunday night. I'm beginning to feel like Job, except that I lost my faith long long ago.

Ah well, things are getting better. I've discovered that the 25-35 page paper I thought I was to have done by 3/23 isn't due until 3/30. I still have to write it over the coming break, but the circumstances will be somewhat more pleasant.

I also think I'm beginning to get a new line for approaching my lit review. It seems that one can draw a link between the hierarchical city systems so passionately believed in in the 1960s and early 1970s and the growth-pole strategy of economic development. Theory then shifts to allow horizontal relations between cities at the same time the tax incentive race-to-the-bottom between cities began. This may very well be the leverage I need to pry something out of the semester. Still, much work to go.

2005-03-06, Sunday 6:10pm

I need to get a grip. Okay, so it is midterms and they are stressing me out too much. But since when have I become such a stressball? I guess since I've discovered how little I know and how much I am expected to know...or expect myself to know. I feel that I was patient until Susan started driving us doctoral candidates forward. Now I feel like I must deliver the products of work I have not done...and I don't want to do a shitty job!

Well, in the immortal words of Johnny Depp, "Fuck it!" I've just got to do what I need to do, trust in it, and stop being jealous of those around me. It makes me judgmental, slightly hostile, and prone to whining in public forums (like this) rather than enjoying the wonderful people I encounter. Grace has got the right attitude.

2005-03-02, Wednesday 9:09am

You know you need to start worrying about your online life when you receive more emails through listserves from yourself than you receive from other people. I'm worried.

2005-02-28, Monday 9:20am

My artistic sensibilities were affirmed yesterday. My lovely friend who was going to come out here to help assemble and disassemble The Gates before Hollywood intervened informed me that the project was originally intended to go up during the fall (Fall 2003 to be exact), which would have given the orange fabric an entirely different (and less alienating) feel. She also told me that in the original drawings the Gates' arches were also presented in a different color. Did they simply default to the construction site orange because it was more cost effective?

2005-02-27, Sunday 9:53am

Even my wife is telling me that all I do is complain here. So you know it's gotten bad. Well, I didn't complain the other day and I'm not complaining now.

We visited The Gates yesterday. The weather was not nearly as nice as it is now, so my comments may be adversely affected by less than ideal conditions. I was underwhelmed to be sure. The concept has potential, but the execution was lacking. Walking underneath them provided some pleasant effects that were limited to the nature of The Gates themselves. And carefully selected framing and Photoshop can produce some lovely pictures. But as landscape art and as a visceral experience, The Gates were weak. In person, The Gates felt crowded together, they seemed to lose any sense of flow they may have had (and needed) when they arrived at intersections, and they seldom lent emotion or visual impact to the landscape. Perhaps today's sunshine would make me change my mind (though I will never know), but I felt that the colors were all wrong. The orange was too pale. Perhaps red would have been better. And they tried to match the poles to the fabric. Bad idea. Knowing that such a thing was impossible, especially in changing sunlight, Jean-Claude and Christo should have used the frames to add depth to each gate.

2005-02-24, Thursday 11:49am

It's been a full week (minus ten minutes) since I've found an opportunity to scribble anything up here. I haven't been out. I haven't slept. I think I'm about to be sick. Very optimistic, eh? I'm definitely scheduling a nap for the afternoon.

In an odd note of coincidence (since I expect the return phonecall as soon as I lay down to actually take the scheduled nap), I just realized a minor curiosity occured yesterday. We were sitting in colloquium discussing the differing incentives to work in the private sector versus the public sector. I decided to tell the short story of my friend J, who had left the public sector to make twice as much doing the same job in the private sector only to return to the public sector because of the improved quality of life provided by a shorter workweek. Not long after, while I sat in class, my phone started vibrating. The message I listened to a few hours later was from a special investigator for the government who wants to interview me for an additional security clearance for my friend.

So, issues of the week include the (not-so) New Urbanism and the Creative Class. First, is the New Urbanism postmodern? There are certainly postmodern interpretations of the New Urbanism's totalizing discourse (about community) and its dependence on a superficial pastiche of past styles, but does it embrace postmodern principles?

Second, does Florida's definition of the creative class fit into Weber's conception of class? For Florida (p. 8), "A class is a cluster of people who have common interests and tend to think, feel and behave similarly, but these similarities are fundamentally determined by economic function--by the kind of work they do for a living." He breaks the Creative Class into two groups. The Core is those "whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content." The broader group of creative professionals "engage in complex problem solving that involves a great deal of independent judgment and requires high level of education or human capital." Members of both groups "share a common creative ethos that values cretivity, individuality, difference and merit." In Economy and Society, Weber (p. 926) says, "We can speak of a 'class' when (1) a number of people have in common a specific causal component of their life chances, insofar as (2) this component is represented exclusively by economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income, and (3) is represented under the conditions of the commodity or labor markets." Realizing that Florida includes "people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment" whose "life chances" are by no means similar (Scientists and engineers' "opportunities for income" differ distinctly from those of musicians.), the claim that these people are members of a common class breaks down rapidly.

One might try to salvage something from this in two ways. First, one could turn to Marx's definition of class, "A group of people sharing common relations to labor and the means of production", but this runs into similar difficulties when you imagine the typical engineer sitting in his or her firm's office working out the tensile strength necessary for some small piece buried deep within a portable electronic device that will soon enter production with the artist throwing pigment on a canvas in their converted loft in preparation for an open house. Neither may be alienated from their labor (though the first runs a much higher risk), but they certainly labor in different modes of production. The other alternative, and far more viable, is to consider the Creative Class not a class but a status group. Weber defines these often "amorphous" groups as groups that share components of life that are "determined by a specific, positive or negative, social estimation of honor" (p. 932). The decisive substantive aspect is "the fact that above all else a specific style of life is expected from all those who wish to belong to the circle" (p. 932). This is primarily demonstrated through consumption patterns, which is one way Florida attempts to characterize the Creative Class and its coffee drinking, mountain biking ways. This almost certainly also breaks down on closer inspection, but I leave that to the reader since I'm ready for a nap.

2005-02-17, Thursday 12:09pm

Feeling much better since yesterday...as I knew I would. It's probably because I'm ignoring the huge pile of work surrounding me. It's also because I began to get something down on paper for the lit review for my "dissertation". And it turns out I got 2/5 on my pop quiz in Multivariate Political Analysis the other day, which was a decent score it seems.

And now I'll be going out to lunch with people I haven't for ages.

2005-02-15, Tuesday 7:16pm

Well, this is going to be a whiny, self-deprecating entry designed to purge myself and gain perspective. So, though this type of thing does not belong in the public realm, I'm going to put it out there. You may be best advised to skip over the remainder (though, of course, such an admonition will only foster the curiosity that has brought you to this page anyhow...if you're not me).

I'm in the last semester of my official phd coursework. It is my tenth semester in a row. I feel like I finally have identified the literatures I need to move into the long duree of my academic career. I believe that part of the reason I have not found it sooner is that I have not had the opportunity to discover it. It does not exist in our program. Thus, I've been forced to read around it and build toward the time I could explore it without the demands on classes. Of course, I should take some responsibility for my current state of frustration and sense of intellectual inferiority. My interests have ranged widely, which I still consider a virtue, and I have not taken the few opportunities that have existed to focus some of my efforts on the world city network, industrial structure, and the impact on the distribution of wealth in the process of economic development. And now it's come to a head. I am expected to produce a "detailed outline" for a literature review of books I have not read in the classes that have not been offered.

I'm trying to figure out what I've learned over the last four years. A lot, but I'm not sure what. I don't feel like I can make any claims to specialized knowledge in any particular field.

Well, to hell with this whining. I'm going back to work.

2005-02-05, Saturday 7:15pm

Upon watching that video again, I've decided that it's too disturbing to offer directly. If you really want to see it or have a rebellious teenage kid who needs some perspective, you can find it at mangoat.net for now, but you're going to have to take the extra step to find it.

2005-02-05, Saturday 9:20am

This is how busy I've become, posts only once a week...and brief at that. I'm caught up in econometrics. Loving it, but consumed by it. I feel like something has to go, some class or responsibility, but nothing seems to be doing so. I guess it's just going to be a hardworking semester.

Now if I could only get the frickin' pneumonia out of my lungs...

For you karmic crusaders out there, here is a link from mangoat.net that captures instant payback. Please be warned that if you take a moment to really absorb what is happening in the video, your stomache will become unsettled.

2005-01-30, Sunday 11:24am

I don't know how that Jay S. does it. I've never really pictured him as a ladies' man, but every time I see him, he's got a new woman on his arm.

2004 in virals.

2005-01-29, Saturday 10:38am

Two parties I very much want to go to tonight...and I feel like shit. An evil cold has lodged itself in the back of my head and deep in my lungs. Hopefully, this will be just one little blip of bad health in frigid weather and then the rest of the semester will be filled with spring-like vital energies.

2005-01-28, Friday 7:29am

Finally, the last day of 6:30am alarms has begun...with a bang, of course. But the last, nevertheless. From now on, I'll be waking up at this time, leading to a much more civilized life.

By the way, if you're interested in data on poverty, race, and family type, for a limited time you can download this 18.9MB Excel file I put together during a Bowling-League debate on Peter Hall's racism. The results are intriguing. Single male headed households have much lower poverty rates, regardless of race. White couples with children have higher rates of poverty than single female headed families, while it is vice versa for black families and completely indistinguishable for hispanic families.

2005-01-26, Wednesday 7:57pm

So school is well underway. I'm teaching a planning theory discussion section, about which I'm very excited. Unfortunately, guiding a discussion section in such a way as to explore the issues one feels is most important is distinctly different from keeping and ESL conversation class going. Making conversation is one thing, inducing students to discuss particular points is another thing entirely. More exciting skills to develop. If only I could channel Peter Marcuse...

That said, we're reading Marx's The German Ideology in colloquium. First of all, it kicks ass. Second, having read a little Hegel (and I do mean a little), I think I see how his thought is reflected in Marx. Of course, Susan isn't convinced of my stories about him. Regardless, it seems to me that in suffering from a sort of Cartesian dualism, he is able to treat physical activity as completely fungible, when in fact every physical aspect of labour is embraced in knowledge acquired over time, even if that knowledge is about the idiosynchrasies of a particular machine in a particular factory. Thus, when proposing a future where [cont'd Thursday am] workers can be a farmer in the morning, a fisherman in the afternoon, and a critic at night, Marx is promising a completion of self based on the false idea that division of labor, which is dependent on experience over time, is completely malleable.

I also believe that his sense of history is the material equivalent of Hegel's idealist history. Instead of Reason making itself ever more evident and culminating in self-awareness that simultaneously acts and understands its actions, dissolving the division between the two, Marx's history promises a future of undifferentiated production characterized by "self-activity" that dissolves the division between labour and the means of production. In the same way the contradictions in historical reason expand humanity's understanding and culminate in being one with the universal spirit, Marx's historical materialism progresses through the unsustainable tension between the mode of production and social organization and climaxes in a paradaisical phase in which humanity finds its universal fulfillment in communist production.

Hence the atavistic religious overtones of communism. Instead, following evolutionary theory, all we can really say is that tensions between the mode of production and social organization will lead to mutual readjustment and co-adaptation. And then the existential angst begins to rise in one's throat and the taste of bile befouls the tongue.

2005-01-19, Wednesday 12:44pm

What is it about people with power and apparently overly confident in their own sense of self-importance that can so easily lead to dismissive behavior that lacks any warmth or civility? Yesterday, there was a half-hour overlap room scheduling conflict between my section and a class taught by the director of another program here. This other individual chose not try to sort out the problem with the person responsible for room scheduling. Instead, he simply fumed about general ineptitude, told me how large his program was (if you know what I mean), and moved his very large class into a room that appeared too small. So I resolved the conflict, moving to another room nearby that I believe to be slightly larger. To be polite, I notified the fellow with the large program and offered him the other room. His response was a resounding negative conveyed in the petulant tone of a spoiled child and boiled down to: "It's mine. I want it." No signature. No gesture of understanding. No "glad we worked this out". No civility. In short, no class.

For once in my life, I'm glad that I exercised an uncharacteristic lack of temerity in the face of power. I even had the belated pleasure of having to ask who he was. Rather than introducing himself, he simply handed me his card. Class, I tell ya, class.

2005-01-19, Wednesday 7:12am

No time to say anything except that I'm fairly excited about the semester so far. As much as I dread the burden of abandoning my current strain of thought to the demands of my class schedules, the first days of classes are always so heady and fun. Plus, the classes I sat in on and the section I led were are so very interesting. I wish I had an extra six hours in every day.

2005-01-12, Wednesday 3:14pm

In my slow return to functionality after a long night of alcohol abuse including some super-tasty Knob Creek bourbon, I have been gradually ramping up the complexity of my activities. Along the way, I found a word that would make a delightful insult for a person who lives in a messy environment or fills their head with filth. That word is: coprozoic, meaning 'to live in dung'.

2005-01-11, Tuesday 3:34pm

Over the last five days I've been occupied away from academics if not from the intellect entirely. I spent Thursday and Friday filming and editing my ode to Godard video letter to Yoonkyung for her birthday. It turned out to be much more fun than anticipated. I'm getting more and more into these "instantaneous" short productions. Get an idea, film it, and edit it within 24-48 hours. It's a bit like jazz improvisation. With little time to fine tune or to get exactly the right shot, you're forced to hit it and quit it. Working with what's available, you lay out your story or idea. In fact it evolves along the way, like life sped up. Unfortunately, this particular production is too large to put on my site and requires one to be able to read poorly written Korean to really "appreciate". Or perhaps you just have to be Yoonkyung or I to appreciate it.

We also got a new bedframe and wardrobe on Saturday. So much of the weekend was spent rearranging and improving our apartment. So life is undoubtedly better and we are undoubtedly happier...at least until the new furniture becomes familiar.

Saw a snippet of Charlie Rose last night in which Martin Seligman of UPENN claimed his studies revealed that one of the surer fire ways to become happier is, as you're going to bed, to identify three things that went well during the day and the reasons they went well. It's supposed to counteract most people's tendencies to dwell on those things that went poorly. I'm giving it a shot.

But now it's time to get geared up for the semester. Too many books to finish up.

2005-01-06, Thursday 5:09pm

I don't know why, but I'm having a low self-confidence day. No special reason. I think I'm just jealous of people making their mark on the world. Met the new prof today, and she's already got trips to go on for the department. Read about some new courses. And just wonder when I'm going to feel like I'm getting something done.

For all that I am doing, it makes no sense. Just a psychological blip, I'm sure. I'm getting further on with my reading for the break. (Perhaps the feeling has arisen because I can already see the freedom coming to an end.) New questions are coming up that I'll be able to approach during the semester as one of Susan's TAs. And I'm even in the midst of trying to assemble a quick, Godard-style short.

My Godard indulgence has been profitable (and pleasurable?) this break. It's been fun developing a sense of how he self-consciously, transparently toys with established film formats. Yesterday I watched Pierrot Le Fou and My life to live. Both excellent. The first for its playful flaunting of format and contradistinction of the joy in art from the banality of consumer society. The second for the story, the cinematography, and the beautiful use of the silent film format. Right now I only want to work in wide screen (16:9) and black and white (with perhaps some color overlays or seepage?).

The Frankfurt School reading has led me to a new issue. I'm halfway through Eros and Civilization, which is truly an exciting read on social evolution and may provide some semblance of an answer to my question. That question is where does the morality that drives the value judgments come from? Horkheimer and Marcuse make it clear that we are in a position to rationally plan for our future. This is slightly problematic in that even our best rational planning is bounded by the sheer complexity of our world. Theoretically that can be overcome and worked around without losing the spirit of the position. Horkheimer also encounters a minor difficulty by accepting the economics argument that capitalism functions through the blind pursuit of self-interest and claiming that therefore capitalism is unguided. This is in direct opposition to their claims that socio-economic organization is made by humans. They also need to recognize that capitalists do guide the development of our economic system. (Marcuse may do this, but I don't think Horkheimer does so consistently.) But this, too, is not a major obstacle to moving forward with a critical stance. My new question is: how do we determine the moral outcome or action? Can reason produce morals? Can we logically deduce or induce principles of moral action and moral goals? Or is morality simply an irreducible mental stance? Do we just have morals?

Eros and Civilization begins to speak of society's role in establishing the rules of the ego through the superego. This surely begins to explain things, but it doesn't get to how one's morals could differ so much from one's society. How does deviant morality arise within society? Is it a macrolevel result of suppression in other sectors of society? If so, who's right? How do we determine appropriate moral action?

I don't think I could alter my fundamental moral stance (not that it hasn't undergone minor change over my lifetime) and I know I'm right, but I sure would like to be able to justify it.

2005-01-02, Sunday 12:40pm

Goddamn! I certainly shouldn't be writing this in such a public place, but my eyes have been welling up with tears like crazy lately. Yesterday watching Diarios de motocicleta about Che Guevara's childhood, there was a slow trickle. Today a letter from an old friend from Korea has me feeling all warm and overflowing. I'm strangely obsessed with Frankfurt School and the sociology of knowledge right now, which feel like they're inducing a tectonic shift deep down in my organization of the world and my foundation for action. It as though I'm taking my own motorcycle journey through philosophy. I've seen some suffering and injustice in my travels and now I'm learning how to mentally organize it.

And again props to my man Patricio who once told me at a very emotional time, "A baby always cries when it is born." Much love.

2005-01-01, Saturday 12:27pm

And a new year begins. Nothing insightful to start with, just a technical note. I've decided to eliminate the make comments links for each date, since they remain unused...except by spammers.

In a sudden aboutface in our general social life, Yoonkyung decided to invite our friends Yoosook and JeeYeop over to welcome the New Year. It was a lot of fun and certainly more lively than watching Kill Bill by ourselves. Strange how that little bit of effort to overcome the inertia of lazy solitude can add to life. Perhaps that should (yet again) be my New Year's Resolution: "Overcome Inertia".

archives: 2004, 2003