The infinite city, cont’d: Terry Jones versus the Beatles

Documentary filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady capture a moment of hate — and love — in a city big enough to contain both:

I love this town.

(via The New York Times)

“Still holding on to that torch for life”

A song for New York, from Lucy Kaplansky:

It’s been eleven years, and songs like this — and the memories of that day — still bring tears to my eyes. I don’t think I’ll ever be over it.

My daughter is eleven now. She was just four months old on 9/11 and has no memory of that day, only the stories her parents have told her — it’s history for her, just another thing that happened in the world before she became aware of the world. Maybe that’s the way it should be. I wouldn’t wish this quiet grief to haunt her for the rest of her days. Let her acknowledge that day and move on with her life, in sunlight and in joy.

They’re teaching her in middle school to accept — “not just tolerate” — all cultures. I temper it a bit, telling her that all people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. Where cultures have wrong ideas — honor killings, female genital mutilation, the belief in the supremacy of one religion or another — people must speak out against them.

But perhaps the middle school teachers are right to emphasize respect and acceptance first: if respect is the foundation, perhaps it will help kids grow up to remember that whoever they disagree with is a human being too. In the end, after all the many important issues to disagree about, there’s nothing more important than that.

More thoughts on 9/11 here.

Science for the people!

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman answers science questions from passersby on the street corners of New York:

Chemist Stephen Benkovic answers questions in Philly:

What a wonderful, and wonderfully democratic, idea. I wish there were more; the videos, produced by ScienCentral, date from 2008 and 2009, and no more seem to have been filmed since then. Too bad; making scientists accessible, and having them engage directly with the public about their questions and concerns, seems like an excellent way to make science feel relevant again, and help raise the science literacy of the country — one curious passerby at a time.

(via Boing Boing)

The best TED talk ever

Courtesy of Improv Everywhere. Founder Charlie Todd’s (real) TED talk is also very much worth a look.

More videos here (including this one).

(via TED)

What do teachers make? They make a goddamn difference.

A classic performance by the fiery spoken-word poet, teacher, and teachers’ advocate Taylor Mali:

A more recent version, coinciding with the publication of Mali’s book, What Teachers Make:

I love this poem for what it says about teachers’ passion, commitment, and the undervalued importance of their sacred trust to help shape the next generation. But it also seems to present a one-sided version of education: the strict, no-nonsense, sit-down-and-shut-up teacher who needs to whip reluctant and undisciplined students into shape. That’s not a model that will work for everyone; why is there no mention of kindness, encouragement, and the importance of letting students ask questions rather than slapping them down? How do you get kids to love and look forward to learning, rather than view it as medicine that they have to swallow? A wise comment on YouTube (a true rarity!) points out:

I love the message of the video — that teaching is about more than just a salary, but without context, some of the pedagogy in the video is straight up flawed. Encourage group work/ collaborative learning (when appropriate). If students are constantly looking for a way out of the classroom, it’s a good indicator that you need to make your lessons more engaging. Teachers should never strike fear in parents. Parents can be valuable resources. Finally, NEVER tell students they can’t ask questions.

Yes. Mali says he makes students wonder, but I wish he’d elaborate on that. Kids are born curious and wondering; how do we avoid squashing that, and just get out of the way?

Nevertheless, point taken: Teachers have a difficult and tremendously important job, and should be valued and supported in this country more than they are. I’d add that not only shouldn’t they be judged by how much money they make, but they also can’t be judged by flawed rating systems such as New York City’s — a ludicrous calculation involving “value-added scores” that lets good teachers slip through the cracks. William Johnson, supposedly a “bad teacher,” explains:

[T]he reality [is] that teachers care a great deal about our work. At the school where I work today, my “bad” teaching has mostly been very successful. Even so, I leave work most days replaying lessons in my mind, wishing I’d done something differently. This isn’t because my lessons are bad, but because I want to get better at my job. [...]

The truth is, teachers don’t need elected officials to motivate us. If our students are not learning, they let us know. They put their heads down or they pass notes. They raise their hands and ask for clarification. Sometimes, they just stare at us like zombies. Few things are more excruciating for a teacher than leading a class that’s not learning. Good administrators use the evaluation processes to support teachers and help them avoid those painful classroom moments — not to weed out the teachers who don’t produce good test scores or adhere to their pedagogical beliefs.

And an excellent point about the student-teacher relationship:

That said, given all the support in the world, even the best teacher can’t force his students to learn. Students aren’t simply passive vessels, waiting to absorb information from their teachers and regurgitate it through high-stakes assessments. They make choices about what they will and won’t learn. I know I did. When I was a teenager, I often stayed up way too late, talking with friends, listening to music or playing video games. Did this affect my performance on tests? Undoubtedly. Were my teachers responsible for these choices? No.

Schoolteacher Laura Klein chimes in:

[W]ith teaching, it’s always hard to know just how much of the results are the result of good teaching. Perhaps it is good parenting, or the work of previous teachers. Sometimes it is just the result of a child maturing and coming into her own.

Still, when a child succeeds in your class for the first time in her academic career, it is one of the rare occasions when you can feel as if you had something to do with it. And you are probably right. There’s a good chance that the relationship that you have with that student has played an important role in her success. But that’s not necessarily a good thing. [...]

Kids who succeed because of us are not kids who have the tools to succeed in the long run.

“Don’t do it for me; care about yourself,” my co-teacher often says to our students [...]

A good relationship can change a child’s year, but it doesn’t usually change her life. For that, we have to change the way that students relate to themselves.

What to make of all this? Perhaps that Taylor Mali is right — that teachers make a goddamn difference — but also that students aren’t automatons, waiting for the right programmer. They’re human individuals, needing encouragement and direction, but ultimately choosing their paths for themselves, as we all do.

Another excellent spoken-word piece by Mali here.

The infinite city, cont’d: Welcome to the grid

A fascinating new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011,” commemorates “the 200th anniversary of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, the foundational document that established Manhattan’s famous street grid.”

Michael Kimmelman writes that the grid was “big government in action, a commercially minded boon to private development and, almost despite itself, a creative template.” Grid plans for cities had existed for millennia, but imposing such a plan on Manhattan was “deeply subversive” because the land had already been divided up into privately owned sections. Hence the hand of government: decades of surveying, redrawing property lines, transforming open fields into paved streets — and sometimes meeting with resistance from the public. As curator Hilary Ballon says elsewhere: “What I found absolutely remarkable [...] was how the city had a commitment to executing this vision, which required a pretty significant transformation in how the city worked — a greater degree of governmental authority, changes in the taxation system to fund this road building, and a multigenerational commitment to its implementation.” The grid, in other words, serves as a prime example of why government matters, and what ambitious long-term government planning can accomplish.

With an indispensable caveat, of course: that, as Kimmelman says, “[a]n equitable and just city today depends on a vigilant populace keeping tabs on our planners and politicians.”

He also explores the metaphysics of the grid:

[T]he grid has proved itself oddly beautiful.

I’m referring not just to the sociability it promotes, which Jane Jacobs identified, or to the density it allows, which Rem Koolhaas celebrates, or even to the ecological efficiency it sustains, which now makes New York, on a per-capita basis, a very green place. I’m also referring to a kind of awareness it encourages.

It’s true that Manhattan lacks the elegant squares, axial boulevards and civic monuments around which other cities designed their public spaces. But it has evolved a public realm of streets and sidewalks that creates urban theater on the grandest level. No two blocks are ever precisely the same because the grid indulges variety, building to building, street to street. [...]

The grid also makes a complex place instantly navigable. This isn’t a trivial benefit. Cities like Berlin and London, historic agglomerations of villages, include vast nowhere stretches, and they sprawl in ways that discourage easy comprehension and walking. An epicenter of diversity, Manhattan by contrast invites long walks, because walkers can judge distances easily and always know where they are. The grid binds the island just as New Yorkers are bound by a shared identity.

That is, the grid gives physical form to a certain democratic, melting-pot idea — not a new concept, and probably not exactly what the planners had in mind, but worth restating. In the same way that tourists who come to Manhattan can easily grasp the layout and, as such, feel they immediately possess the city, outsiders who move here become New Yorkers simply by saying so. By contrast, an American can live for half a century in Rome or Hamburg or Copenhagen or Tokyo but never become Italian or German or Danish or Japanese. Anybody can become a New Yorker. The city, like its grid, exists to be adopted and made one’s own.

Yes.

Read the whole review (and see a slideshow) here.

(Photo by Todd Heisler)

The infinite city, cont’d: A doorway to the underworld

Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG has written a fascinating post about an innocuous-looking building in my borough that — to my delight — turns out to be a ventilator and escape hatch leading to NYC’s vast underground subway system:

In the novel Foucault’s Pendulum, two characters discuss a house that is not what it appears to be. People “walk by” this certain house in Paris, we read, “and they don’t know the truth. That the house is a fake. It’s a facade, an enclosure with no room, no interior. It is really a chimney, a ventilation flue that serves to release the vapors of the regional Métro. And once you know this you feel you are standing at the mouth of the underworld…”

Two days ago, Nicola Twilley and I went on an early evening expedition over to visit the house at 58 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn, with its blacked out windows and unresponsive front door.

This “house” is actually “the world’s only Greek Revival subway ventilator” and disguised emergency exit.

[...] Nicola and I walked over to see the house for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the disguised-entrance-to-the-underworld is undoubtedly one of the coolest building programs imaginable, and would make an amazing premise for an intensive design studio; but also because the surface vent structures through which underground currents of air are controlled have always fascinated me.

These vents appear throughout New York City, as it happens — although Joralemon, I believe, is the only fake house — serving as surface articulations of the larger buried networks to which they are connected.

Manaugh links to a Brooklyn Daily Eagle article with more information:

BROOKLYN HEIGHTS — The tidy, three-story brownstone looks like any other on the cobblestone block in Brooklyn, but it isn’t. It leads directly down to the nation’s largest subway system.

Brooklyn Heights, in fact, is home to many secret emergency stairways leading to track lines that climb from under the East River to stations in Brooklyn, since Brooklyn Heights and Downtown Brooklyn are where many lines converge before fanning out to the rest of the borough. These emergency exits are sealed, unmarked and rarely, if ever used.

Located in the tunnel just east of the river, the exit disguised as a brownstone leads to a grimy-lit set of metal stairs that ascend past utility boxes and ventilation shafts into a windowless room with a door. If you opened the door, you would find yourself on a stoop, which is just part of the façade.

Even though this exit remains secret to most, its existence is widely known to Heights residents.

The NYPD’s heightened security measures around this exit, including an update in protection from a single bolt in the middle of the door to silent alarms and motion detectors, reflects concerns that a terrorist could use this passageway to sneak into the subway system or try to tamper with the ventilation.

Fantastic; that’s grist for plenty of crime/urban fantasy novels right there. I’ll have to visit sometime soon.

Check out BLDGBLOG for more photos, as well as information on other “secret” connections to NYC’s underground, including edifices at Governor’s Island and the Holland Tunnel.

(via io9. I love the connection that one of the commenters makes: the house-that-isn’t-a-house certainly resembles the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix.)

Why libraries matter, cont’d: “Home. That’s it.”

A very inspiring video from the New York Public Library:

Unlike critics of the Library’s plan to transform the central branch from a researcher’s storehouse into a vital hub of activity — a former curator sniffs that the Mid-Manhattan branch across the street is “utter chaos. And it will all come here — the noise, the teenage problems, the circulating DVDs” — I think the Library has it exactly right. The fabled stacks of books in the main branch will merely be relocated, not destroyed, not made inaccessible. But a living library should be a vibrant gathering place for the community, especially the next generation — those thousands of noisy kids and teenagers that the supporters of the library-as-silent-crypt disdain. Democracy IS noise and chaos — that’s how people engage with ideas and with each other, and learn to become citizens. And the library should be its beating heart.

Give to the NYPL here. And support your own local library as well.

Voices from the 99%: the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology

You must download this: a massive (and still-ongoing) compilation of poetry (and, it seems, a few prose pieces) submitted to the People’s Library by people from around the world, professional writers and amateurs alike, in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Editor Stephen Boyer explains the philosophy behind the anthology:

First of all, we don’t say no to anyone. Everyone that sends their work gets their work into the anthology. It’s not that I’m against anthologies that are critical about what they print. It’s just that this movement is a move toward inclusiveness and the Occupy Wall St. Poetry Anthology must reflect that. And this inclusiveness allows for a range of work that I’ve never seen. Children are sending their poems. Queer writers are sending their poems. Kids obsessed with hip-hop are sending their poems. Grumpy old men are sending their poems. Daydreamers are sending their poems. Professors are sending their poems. Homeless people without access to computers or places that put out calls for submissions are sending their poems. Famous poets are sending their poems. It’s truly an anthology made of and by and for the people. It seems that someone from every walk of life is making space for their vision in the anthology.

The first poem, “Taking Brooklyn Bridge” by “Stuart,” is a sprawling, soaring, joyous, and brave response to Walt Whitman that embodies the anthology’s spirit. A taste:

I came to atone for my apathy,
I came to teach the future vigilance,
better to be loud, be awkward, be dirty, be flawed,
you who are to come, make the people uncomfortable
because they are too timid to join you,
make the leaders uncomfortable
because they know you are unafraid,
I tell you that it is better to be one of the great democratic
people than it is to be a lord or a peasant.

We began to march from Liberty Square, a place
that now fully deserves its name, toward
the Brooklyn Bridge, and we chanted and sang
and called to those who watched to join us,
and there was a feeling in the air, a passion that
joined together every hearty soul, we all knew
we were on the side of the just, that we meant
no harm to any person, that we sought no more
than what was fair and sought it not only for ourselves,
and several times on the march my eyes welled with tears,
my emotions overwhelmed by the chaotic, brilliant
beauty of those marchers, of that which we marched for.

The long line of the protestors wound beneath
the towers of those who would squander the world,
devouring all that is good with their insatiable appetites,
making our way to the Brooklyn Bridge and when I saw
the towers of the bridge before me I started to laugh,
what better way to pay back Walt Whitman than to honor
his song at the crossing to Brooklyn, to march across the bridge
over the waters he crossed so many times, the bridge that poets
have embraced as a symbol, not only of ingenuity and progress,
not only of endeavor and perseverance, but as a symbol of democracy,
of the great crossing of humanity from tyranny to freedom.

They are here Walt and I am with them, the African father
pushing his daughter in a stroller, she holding a sign that proclaims
she too will fight for her future, the old man singing
‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ with wit and irony,
the veterans who know only too well of betrayal, the young girl
with bright fiery hair whose strong voice chants, “We got sold out,
banks got bailed out!” the unshaven college boy who has slept
in the park for two weeks seizing the future with determined hands,
the middle aged lady, vibrant and experienced, rallying us
to raise our voices, the mother and daughter holding a sign
that reads — America, Can you hear us now! All ages, all races,
all voices, songs and chants overlapping, strangers becoming comrades.

[...]

I knew that we had come to the Brooklyn Bridge and given it the
meaning
poets had sought to give it in their words, we had brought
the rough, sacred spirit of democracy to the Brooklyn Bridge,
we had restored Whitman’s song to it’s very birthplace,
for he had called to us, the future, in his song, he sings to us now,
he knew that we would be here, he stands with us, chants with us,
and here I am on the Brooklyn Bridge on a day as important
as any day that has ever passed, watching Walt Whitman
above the bridge towers, sounding his barbaric yawp
above us, calling down the sign of democracy,
calling us to remember, not just one amazing day,
but the task to come – Sing on – Sing on – Sing on!

More — much more — here.

(Image by mollycrabapple)

Why libraries matter, cont’d: The library is the weapon of the people

The website of the People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street has a roundup of media coverage of the library’s destruction by the police on November 15. The sharpest and pithiest of the commentaries must surely be Salman Rushdie’s scathing remarks on Twitter. In an op-ed for Al Jazeera (worth reading in full), Mark LeVine expands on the central role — both in symbolic and practical terms — of the protest library:

The “People’s Library” was at the heart of the OWS encampment at Zuccotti Park, and has played a similar role in other large occupations, such as Los Angeles. It is the necessary complement to the actual physical occupation of urban space represented by the OWS movement. Many people might wonder why it’s so important for protesters permanently to camp when the reality, especially as the weather turns bad, is that few people are actually doing anything at night besides sleeping.

But the point of the occupation is precisely to reconquer space that has been taken over, either by the state or by private interests — a kind of “eminent domain” of, by and for the people – and create a permanent presence that can engender and nourish the kind of community and solidarity that have so disappeared in the United States in the last forty years. By permanently occupying Zuccotti and other parks, the OWS movement created a space where people could gather, create libraries, share books and ideas, and even meals. Where they could plan for another world that isn’t merely possible anymore, but the only hope for the survival of humanity as a civilisation.

The library, which took weeks to establish, reflected the uniqueness and power of the still young 99 per cent movement. “From the very beginning [says friend and radio producer Alan Minsky], the OWS encampments were not just gestures of protest thinly focused on making statements about the ills of society, but were efforts to build community where people were knowledgeable and participated in informed dialogue. The libraries, at least in Zuccotti and in Los Angeles, have been central. Here in LA a graduate student made her entire personal library available to occupiers. These libraries have contemporary theory, classical literature, incisive analyses, and all sorts of books that have been marginalised from the mainstream media and culture. But when the history of this period will be written, these are the books that will be remembered.”

So much did the “people’s library” idea resonate that the OWS library couldn’t keep up with all the donations they’ve received and encouraging people to take books out. The website lists some of the newest arrivals in the days before the raid: Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia, by Savo Heleta, Nuclear Nebraska, by Susan Cragin, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, From the Heat of the Day, by Roy A.K. Heath, Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, and innumerable other books that were opening the minds of all who passed through OWS and the many peoples’ libraries it has fostered across the country.

Minsky continued, “This open philosophy stands in stark opposition to the world of corporate culture. Trashing the library was symbolic of what the combined forces of Bloomberg and the NYPD feel about learning and the society in which we live.” (Indeed, Mayor Bloomberg, who claimed full responsibility for the raid’s execution, had to know about the library. Yet his “minutely planned raid” – as the New York Times described it — shovelled thousands of books into garbage trucks to be carted away to the nearest sanitation facility).

In contrast to those who now argue that OWS must grow beyond the goal of occupying physical space, LeVine argues that taking up space — with bodies and with books, in a very real, present, and visible way — is one of the most powerful weapons that the Occupy movement has in its arsenal. And here, again, the need for a real-space library is key:

As soon as he heard about the library, [Israeli filmmaker Udi Aloni's] thoughts turned to Heinrich Heine, the great 19th century German poet and critic, who exclaimed in his Almansor the famous words: “Where they burn books, they’ll ultimately burn people too”.

Of course, New York City isn’t burning books, but for Aloni, carting them away in garbage trucks is not that far removed. “When they disrespect books, they disrespect humankind, and when they destroy books, they destroy the spirit of humanity. The library was great because people gave more than they took. OWS was not just a place for activism, but also a place for education and rethinking; not for just blathering on when you don’t know, but being humble and willing to learn. By taking out the library, they’ve tried to stop that crucial process.” [...]

And this is precisely why, despite arguments by some that it’s time for OWS to “declare victory and go inside” for the winter, it is crucial that the movement has identifiable permanent locations where people can publicly meet, read, discuss and debate the crucial issues raised by activists. [...]

It turns out that in the 21st century, seizing and holding territory — both the public square and the public sphere — are inextricably bound together. As Wall Street and Occupy Wall Street continue their battle for the soul of American society into the winter and then an election year, the flood of knowledge represented by the OWS People’s Library is one of the best weapons protesters have to hold their ground against their much better financed, and armed, adversaries. If municipalities and their corporate sponsors are able to push OWS out of public sight, it will be a lot harder to ensure it doesn’t fall out of mind for the millions of Americans who have just begun to feel safe imagining that through direct action, they too can change a system that has never seemed more stacked against them.

The good news is that the people aren’t giving up the library without a fight. Christian Zabriskie gives an account of how, hours after the eviction from Zuccotti Park, the People’s Library is rising from the ashes:

Protesters were allowed back into Zuccotti Park less than 24 hours after they were cleared out, following a variety of legal decisions. The library was immediately restarted with a half a dozen paperbacks. Within two hours the collection was up to over 100 volumes and the library was fully functioning — cataloging, lending, and providing reference services. “The library is still open” was repeated like a mantra. “This is why I became a librarian, this is why I went to library school,” Library Working Group member Zachary Loeb said of the rebuilding. [...]

Zuccotti Park looks very different now. The various stations for food, information, comfort, first aid, and the like had created a village atmosphere. Now all of that has been cleared away, the park is practically just another sterile stretch of stone in the city. “You can clear the tents but you cannot clear the people” has become a new OWS slogan. Within hours of the park reopening, and despite strict access and security protocols, more than 1,000 people were there for the first General Assembly and their claps and shouts echoed off the skyscrapers around the site.

Amidst it all, there was also a functioning library, a small one under fire, but a library just the same. While the future of the Wall Street occupation is unclear, these protesters still believe in what libraries offer everyone. For these activists “The library is open” has become a battle cry.

And it’s open in more ways than one. As a response to the destruction of the first library, OWS has launched a new website, Occupy Educated, to provide recommendations for essential books, articles, and films exploring the relevant issues.

Long live the People’s Library.

(Image via GalleyCat)