One-Way Street

A Species of Hunger Native to the City

One night not long ago my wife and I attended an Arcade Fire concert at the United Center in the West Loop neighborhood of Chicago. I will have more on the concert itself in a separate post. Today I want to take a look around the restaurant at which my wife and I met for dinner before the concert.

We chose a restaurant near the United Center in a former warehouse district on Randolph Street in the West Loop. The bars and restaurants along this street are mostly large establishments, many of them located in converted warehouses and factories.  Urban Belly, the place at which we agreed to meet for dinner, was the quick service side of a restaurant with the rather inscrutable name of BellyQ, as if there is a species of hunger native to the city.

Urban Belly offers a “tour of the world” consisting of “the radically delicious and the curiously familiar.” The “delicious” part of the equation rests in the Asian dishes on the menu, centered around dumplings and bowls, while “familiar” refers to the borrowing of service concepts of casual fast food chains like Chipotle. To avoid Chipotle’s mass-market cultural appropriation, Urban Belly’s website features a narrative of its chef, Bill Kim.

Kim’s story is a quintessentially American one that dives into the melting pot of cultures and experiences to create an identity that is uniquely his own. He started urbanbelly in 2008 to bring together his wide-ranging passions. Asian + American. Fine-dining techniques + neighborhood comfort. Classic dishes + joyous creativity.

The sudden hastening of language toward the end of the narrative, with text-like plus signs reconciling opposites, hints at a structure of feeling experienced by young urbanites. It is globalist, hybrid, and aspirational, but also anxious to move on to the next experience. The general vibe is cool and a little harassed.

The structure of feeling hinted at on the website is expressed most fully in the dining area of Urban Belly. The quick-service Urban Belly space is differentiated by a transparent partition from the full-service BellyQ, which has conventional booths and four-place tables. The Urban Belly space was dimly-lit, with exposed brick and concrete floors. You sat at long, shared tables fashioned from massive pieces of wood-like material. You sat on heavy wooden blocks of similarly indeterminate manufacture. They weren’t chairs. They weren’t stools. The dining area was arranged like a grade-school cafeteria situated in a gymnasium—exertion and replenishment in the same place. Like a cafeteria, the Urban Belly space is convivial but the clock is ticking. There’s no escape from the schedule.

It was a chilly night, the first truly cold night of the season. We ate pork and cilantro dumplings, ramen and pho using disposable wooden chopsticks. The soups were warming and the dim lights soothing. Still, the experience didn’t feel very intimate, and not just because two men were sitting on the not-quite stools next to us. The open spaces, high ceilings and concrete floors made it seem like customers were being warehoused themselves. Just like a grade school cafeteria will revert back to a gymnasium after lunch, after dinner Urban Belly looks like it’s designed to be an easy-to-clean industrial space. I don't think they actually do this, but the space could have been hosed down every night after closing.

The Wicker Park Urban Belly is actually in a residential neighborhood, but on Randolph Street you don’t disappear into the fabric of a neighborhood. It’s a warehouse district, close to highways and rail lines. The few residences in the area are also carved out of industrial spaces. After dinner in the West Loop you get into your car or an Uber and head someplace else. Despite its urban trappings, the West Loop is a transactional space like any commercial strip in the suburbs.

We walked around the corner in the biting wind to our car to hurry to the United Center for the concert. More on that here.

The Global Bourgeois Tribe

it’s a certain sensibility that ties these places together, a kind of progressive globalism, one that cherishes diversity and authenticity, as long as they fall within certain aesthetic parameters. The same can be said about the neighbourhoods that play host to this new global coffee culture. Keong Saik Road in Singapore, Sheung Wan in Hong Kong, Gulou in Beijing: all distinct in their history, culture and architecture, it is their very uniqueness that has earned them the love of a new generation of jet-set gentrifiers.

via readrice.co

You've heard of a globalized upper class which feels no connection to any particular place, not even their native country. There's also trans-national middle class drawn to little pockets of gentrification within huge global cities like Singapore, Hong Kong and Berlin. Their distinguishing characteristics: pre-World War II architecture and craft coffee.

Paris Is a Finished City

“Paris . . . is a finished city.” 

--Alexandre Gady, president of the Société pour la Protection des Paysages et de l’Esthétique de la France. Quoted in Adam Gopnik's excellent report on why Paris can't get rid of the ridiculous "love locks" on the Pont des Arts. By "finished" Gady means central Paris no longer needs, or wants, further development. Ever. 

 

"Escape is not an option."

--Jason Mark on the film Interstellar, which depicts humans escaping from an ecological disaster on earth.

 

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Kate Clark’s Little Girl, which Claudia Rankine used in her book Citizen: An American Lyric, to illustrate the conflict between an African-American woman and her psychiatrist. Read Ratik Asokan's interview  with Rankine.

 

Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner says, “Something happened that nobody can make a movie between $500,000 and $80 million. That can’t be possible.” The mid-budget American film is disappearing, he and others claim. This is not a new trend for certain. It's not clear, though, if the extinction of the mid-budget film is hastening or if this is a continuation of a state of affairs in Hollywood that has existed since the 1970s. There are a number of consequences of the disappearance of the mid-budget film, if that's what's actually happening. Jason Bailey calls attention to the directors who can't get their projects funded. Spike Lee famously has to resort to Kickstarter to finance his latest film. David Lynch hasn't made a film in over a decade. Still, there are directors who regularly make mid-budget films. David Fincher's Gone Girl was made for a comparatively modest (by contemporary Hollywood standards) $61 million.

 

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To ensure the Senate Torture Report is available in paperback/ebook, we're publishing it ASAP: http://t.co/B1bI47XLYj pic.twitter.com/nyVC7I9DvH

— Melville House (@melvillehouse) December 10, 2014

 

9 Kisses is delightful. It's like NYT knew that we'd need something to offset the torture report. http://t.co/upeNjm6xtQ

— Meredith Hindley (@CapitolClio) December 10, 2014

Why Are Chicago Bicyclists Such Jerks?

Why are Chicago bicyclists such jerks? Maybe because for years Chicago bicyclists engaged in a Darwinian struggle for existence against cars, taxis, trucks of all sorts, and potholes—leaving only the most fearless to dare to commute by bike. Or maybe its because the riding season is so short that everyone is in a hurry to get to where they’re going. Or maybe people are letting the adrenaline of bike riding get the best of them.  

Whatever the reason, it’s fair to say there are a good number of assholes riding the streets of downtown. Approximately 20,000 Chicagoans commute by bicycle on a regular basis. Let’s say one percent violate traffic laws so flagrantly that they endanger pedestrians. That’s two hundred sociopaths zipping through the streets of the city ready to flatten anyone who gets in their way. If you’ve walked around downtown you’ve encountered one of them. At Lake and Canal one morning a female cyclist came within inches of hitting me as I stepped into the street to cross with the light. Her expression said, “I would rather we both suffer horribly painful, disfiguring injuries than I should brake for a stoplight.” 

At least she didn’t flip me off as she zoomed by, as another cyclist (also female, by the way) did to Chicago Tribune reporter Ron Grossman in a similar incident. He asks a good question: “When is the last time you saw a cop write a ticket for a bicyclist who failed to heed a red light or a stop sign?” Even New York City police will ticket bike riders. Not Chicago cops. 

Grossman goes so far as to propose a bike-free day in Chicago just so pedestrians can enjoy the sights and sounds of the city without worrying about getting a bike tire tread up their back. I don’t know how effective that would be considering how 99% of cyclists already ignore every rule of the road. But even if it worked, there would still be other, equally noxious irritants for pedestrians: people who smoke while walking down the sidewalk, tourists who walk six abreast on the sidewalk, drivers who ignore pedestrian crosswalks, and all those damn razor scooters. 

In any case, Grossman's point shouldn't be dismissed as just another complaint about ill-mannered urban bicyclists. As cities devote more public funds to support urban biking there will be--and should be--more demands for greater accountability for bicyclists who violate the rules of the road. Otherwise we will be trading less car congestions and marginally cleaner air for a further deterioration of public space.  

Islam and Kitsch: The Destruction of Mecca

Good taste has been banished from Mecca (see the hideous kitsch of the Makkah Royal Clock Tower above). So has religious tolerance and diversity.

Unlike Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, Mecca was never a great intellectual and cultural center of Islam. But it was always a pluralistic city where debate among different Muslim sects and schools of thought was not unusual. Now it has been reduced to a monolithic religious entity where only one, ahistoric, literal interpretation of Islam is permitted, and where all other sects, outside of the Salafist brand of Saudi Islam, are regarded as false. Indeed, zealots frequently threaten pilgrims of different sects. Last year, a group of Shiite pilgrims from Michigan were attacked with knives by extremists, and in August, a coalition of American Muslim groups wrote to the State Department asking for protection during this year’s hajj.

via www.nytimes.com

Ziauddin Sardar reports the hajj has become "a mundane exercise in rituals and shopping."

Gentrifizierung

 

This is an old story familiar to residents of many American cities: artists and other creatives revive an abandoned and neglected quarter of a city, then get priced out. In Berlin's case, parts of East Berlin were emptied out after the Berlin Wall fell. Artists moved in, but they can't afford the rents any more.

Germany has suffered conflict situations because of centrifugal attempts of what are called creative collectives. In the city of Hamburg, for instance, artist groups have squatted buildings in protest against urban plans; and in Berlin, für alle Spreeufer movement regularly organizes demonstrations against Mediaspree, an investment group that plans to buy buildings and land near the river Spree.

via sustainablecitiescollective.com

Retiring to McDonalds

The guy in the cubicle next to me is a few years away from retirement. He knows, to the day, how much longer he has. At least once a day he pops his head up and updates me on his retirement plans, which revolve around a golf cart. A couple of weeks ago he went on reconnaissance missions to McDonalds and Panera Bread because he noticed that seniors tend to gather in these places and socialize. He wanted to know if he could be one of those retired guys who kills an afternoon nursing a McCafé and shooting the breeze with old people he barely knows.

Michael Kimmelman did his own reconnaissance mission to a McDonalds in Queens, which is apparently Brooklyn for people on Social Security. He found a McDonalds habituated by older Korean men and asked, "But why that McDonald’s?" Channeling William H. Whyte, Kimmelman discovered that Korean men want to put on their jackets and walk a few blocks to the local McDonalds to chat with their friends and sip on a cup of coffee, for hours. They're harmless enough, but they drive McDonalds managers crazy.

But what's the alternative? The Korean bakery, where they used to hang out, closed. The library is too faraway and really more of a kids' space. There's a community center with a space sanctioned for retirees with a lot of time on their hands, but it's in a church basement and they have to take a bus to get there, but when you have no responsibilities yet no freedom, submitting to a bus schedule is tough to swallow. Besides, who can have an open conversation in a church basement, with God upstairs?

Kimmelman identifies the Flushing McDonalds (image above, from the New York Times story) where the Koreans gather is a NORC, a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community, a term that makes it sound as if, like a cluster of mushrooms growing in an empty lot. old people flourish in conditions most other organisms would find inhospitable. But the McDonalds phenomenon, it seems to me, is more like a storytelling community in which, to use Walter Benjamin's terms, old men gather to exchange experiences that go something like this: even though I'm very far away from home, I have cheated death one more day.

And what did my cubicle neighbor discover? Panera Bread has a better class of old people. And more women.

Pullman National Park?

Chicago's Pullman neighborhood, where Pullman railroad cars were once manufactured, may become a national park. Located on Chicago's South Side, the neighborhood has abandoned factories, underperforming schools, a golf course, and a Walmart, so it's not exactly Yellowstone. Senators Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk want a national park there for economic rather than ecological purposes.

Unfortunately, a rise in visitors doesn’t always trickle down to the community. Consider Lowell, Massachusetts, a former textile hub that was named a national historical park in 1978, when tourism there was virtually nonexistent. An impressive 520,000 visitors came in 2011, spending $35 million, according to the National Park Service. But studies from nonpartisan think tank the Brookings Institution and Boston advocacy group Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association concluded that Lowell hasn’t still fared much better than its surrounding neighbors in decreasing poverty or increasing per capita income.

via www.chicagomag.com

Most of the historical buildings, including the shuttered factories, are already National Historic Sites, so from a preservation point of view a national park won't help much. Why bother?

Is Selling DIA Really Such a Bad Idea?

Peter Schjeldahl should be fired.

via hyperallergic.com

This is Hrag Vartanian in high dudgeon over The New Yorker art critic's suggestion that Detroit sell the Detroit Institute of Arts, among the best art museums in the country.

First of all, Schjeldahl shouldn't be fired for voicing his opinion. His basic argument--that in the hierarchy of needs, art is pretty low for Detroit right now--is valid, even if you don't agree with it.

Schjeldahl makes another, more subtle but no less important point: art and its institutions are two separate things. The modernist avant-garde was dedicated to making precisely this point. Even if the city hangs on to DIA, there's no guarantee its collection will remain intact.

To my mind, selling DIA is probably short-sighted, and Vartanian is right in pointing out that bankruptcies are more complicated than Schjeldahl seems to realize. The big banks are going to get paid in full before the pensioners see a dime from the sale of the Rembrandts. 

Yet the proposal to sell DIA shouldn't be dismissed out of hand if some equitable means can be found to sell it. The loss of the museum, literally, would be an incalculable loss to the city. But the loss of the city of Detroit would be an incalculable loss to the country. I love art, but a city is worth more than a museum.

After Gezi Park

William Harris provides a long background piece on the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul. To Americans, the protests look more like Occupy Wall Street than the Arab Spring. There's an important difference between the American movement and what's unfolding in Turkey: the Turks are a lot better organized and have the potential to become an enduring political force.

The strength of the protests has been their pluralism, banding together labor unions, liberals, anti-capitalists, feminists and environmentalists. They’ve been able to combine critiques of each shade of Erdoğan. Meanwhile, in a major break from Occupy Wall Street, the protestors have been quite clear on their demands: to preserve Gezi Park as it is; to free those involved in the protests who have been detained (including more than 50 lawyers at an Istanbul courthouse and a number, more recently, of volunteer doctors); and to end the violent police repression of the protests. Perhaps Erdoğan’s absolute refusal to compromise can be traced back to these demands—or, if not to the demands themselves, then to the form in which they reached him: If people out in the street can influence policy, what might they ask for next?

via www.thepointmag.com