Whitcomb: The Brutalist Era; Seeking Shoppers; Bummer of a Beach; Book Burners

Whitcomb: The Brutalist Era; Seeking Shoppers; Bummer of a Beach; Book Burners

 

“Father, why did you work? Why did you weep,   

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Mother? Was the story so important?

      ‘Listen!’ the wind

Said to the children, and they fell asleep.’’

From “My Father in the Night Commanding No,’’ by Donald Justice (1925-2004), American poet and teacher. Here’s the whole poem:

 

 

“The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.’’

-- Laozi (born 571 B.C.), Chinese philosopher

 

 

“A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.’’

-- Ralph Nader (born 1934), American political activist

 

 

They’re a couple of weeks late, but it’s cheery to see the bright colors of crocuses finally popping up. The daffodils will soon follow, protected through our thaw-and-freeze cycles by their natural anti-freeze.

 

The colors are particularly appreciated after our cold and dry winter has left grass looking deathly dun-colored, like California’s fire-prone hills. Come to think of it, we’re looking pretty fire-prone ourselves. It’s a good thing that far fewer people smoke cigarettes these days.

 

 

The Brutalist, the epic movie about an immigrant architect and Holocaust survivor, has aroused a lot of interest in “Brutalist” architecture, whose heyday was from the 1950’s to the early ‘70s. It’s characterized by minimalist constructions displaying bare materials, most notably exposed and unpainted concrete or brick, angular shapes  and little if any decoration.

 

When I think back to what I walked by in various cities back then, those then-new gray and hulking creations, some with pipes and other utilities exposed, often come to mind.

 

Some of these buildings are, or were when they went up, quite exciting, even Boston’s famous or infamous city hall, which went up in 1968, or the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, built in the mid and late ’60s. But more people consider them dystopian than beautiful. They also tend to leak! And a big problem is that concrete walls don’t age well, especially in damp climates such as New England’s. The concrete tends to collect dirt and stain, and its heaviness weighs on our spirits. Of course, granite, marble and other rock walls look heavy, too, but they can be very beautiful, if expensive.

 

Most people want some texture, charm and warmth in their built environments – say with weathered brick and wood, seasoned with sometimes quirky decoration, some of it criminally cute. They want to be comforted by the built environments they live amongst. That isn’t to say that they can’t see the beauty in such gorgeous glassy, glittery Modernist (but not Brutalist) creations as the John Hancock Tower in Boston or New York’s Seagram Building and Lever House. (I loved to look at them by day or night when I worked in New York in the ‘70’s.)

 

In any event, Brutalism has had its run, which all in all is a good thing, though some of the “Post-Modernist’’ architecture that has succeeded it since the 80’s is hackneyed, with pastiches of various styles, newish and ancient, looking glued together.

 

 

The 195 Redevelopment District Commission has approved a project on Parcel 9 in downtown Providence that includes 30,000 square feet of retail. I agree with a GoLocal editorial challenging the idea that stores there would do well, considering the retail vacancies around the city already. What would help retail around here, in the long run, would be building much more housing in the city and so providing many more residents/shoppers, from low-income through rich folks – especially those who could walk to the stores. (Can any of Providence Place be turned into housing?)

 

 

The retail I’d most like to see more of around here is neighborhood grocery stores.

 

 

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Newport’s Easton’s Beach has been called one of the filthiest in America. Let’s hope that it’s cleaned up before the summer. Oh, well, Easton’s is washing away anyway….

 

Bacteria are more dangerous than sharks!

 

Hit this link:

 

 

To Serve Everyone

Trump, Musk, and the rest of their gang like to say that the public sector can be run like a business (as Trump ran his multiple bankruptcies and frauds?). But businesses don’t have to be available to serve everyone; they can pick whom to serve. Government, on the other hand, must be prepared to serve everyone, with all the complexities and “inefficiencies’’ that entails.

 

In any case, time to lobby against Trump’s plan to completely privatize the U.S. Postal Service via deals with his private-sector allies/beneficiaries. This would inevitably result in big cutbacks in service, especially in poor neighborhoods and rural areas.

 

Reminder: The biggest factor in Musk’s wealth is huge government contracts.

 

 

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Will Hydro Quebec cut off electrical-power exports to New England? It provides about 10 percent of the region’s juice. I couldn’t blame that utility

for retaliating against Trump’s irrational and destructive tariffs. Part of these tariffs are retribution by an infantile Trump for Canada fighting back against his economic aggression and arrogance.

 

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The Orange Grifter in Chief wants to slash income taxes (especially for rich pals) and offset some of that loss with tariff revenue. But tariffs (which in some highly targeted cases can be useful and patriotic in pumping up certain new sectors) act as consumption taxes (like sales taxes) that hit the poor and middle class the hardest.

 

 

Thinking Is Dangerous!

"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing the evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go into your library and read every book."

-- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in commencement remarks at Dartmouth College on June 14, 1953

 

The Trump regime’s anti-American violations of freedom of speech are accelerating. Americans will need to take to the streets in growing numbers if they want to seriously challenge this.  MAGA Monster particularly dislikes the public skepticism on campuses about those with political and economic power. But skepticism about everything should be welcomed on college campuses.  Higher education is supposed to encourage questioning on the bumpy road to the truth.  In any event, MAGA’s core support includes poorly educated,  “low-information’’  folks who are primed to resent college students and faculty.

 

The  Trump regime’s arrest of Green Card holder and Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil for expressing pro-Palestinian views is obviously a tyrannical act meant to scare others from expressing views that the regime doesn’t like.

 

Even right-wing  (but always independent-minded) pundit Ann Coulter commented:

 

“There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the First Amendment?”

 

Will the courts protect the Constitution in this case?

 

Meanwhile, the regime has yanked $400 million in grants to  Columbia, a great research university, because it doesn’t like some of the things said on the campus, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. This is already having a highly destructive impact on research on a broad range of scientific and other matters there. Trump and his lackeys are assaulting other major universities, too. This will hurt the economy and society in general. Universities are great creators of ideas and inventions and thus wealth creators for society.

 

Consider that Johns Hopkins University, a world-renowned center for medical and other scientific research and development, is laying off 2,200 people because the Trumpers are slashing its grants.

 

I think that university and college administrations should generally shy away from taking stands on public issues. But they do have the duty of protecting campuses as places of free inquiry and debate. This is now under attack.

 

At the same time, Trump, The Great Nihilist, is working to destroy the federal Education Department. I doubt that its demise will have all that much effect in many states since education is primarily a state and local responsibility. In any case, Blue States will continue to have better schools than Red ones because the former more fully realize the socio-economic importance of education. That’s a major reason why Blue States are generally much richer than Red ones and why there’s much less willful ignorance and bigotry there, among politicians and the general public.

 

Some Red States, which benefit proportionately more from federal funds than Blue ones, will feel considerable pain from the people they elected.

 

 

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You can bet that Russia will use any  Trump-promoted Ukraine “peace deal’’ and/or ceasefire to try to reinforce its military position. Murderous megalomaniac Putin will not drop his plan to subjugate Ukraine and to go after other former Russian satellites, too. He will lie about everything. As for Trump, any deal will include his effort to camouflage his personal alliance with Putin, which goes back many years.

 

This is interesting. E&E reports:

“The captain of a cargo ship that collided with a tanker containing U.S. armed forces jet fuel in the North Sea is a Russian national, according to the ship’s owners.

“Ernst Russ AG, the German owner of the Portuguese-flagged Solong, told Reuters the 59-year-old captain, who was arrested on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter following the incident Monday morning, is Russian.

“Solong crashed into the U.S. tanker Stena Immaculate off the East Yorkshire coast. The tanker was carrying around 35 million liters of aviation fuel for the U.S. Navy’s Military Sealift Command.’’ (Italics for emphasis.)

Hit this link:

Someday, we’ll have something of an accounting of the Kremlin’s role in America’s 2024 (not just 2016) presidential election -- disinformation campaigns on social media, radio and TV, and voter suppression.

 

Meanwhile, read  House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia, by Craig Unger.

 

Squashing Data

Rigorously collected and analyzed  federal government data has long been crucial for all sectors of American society. But the Trump regime has been seeking to hide data, or distort it, for political purposes, most notably recently regarding disease information. Not good for public health.

 

It’s also eyeing economic data collected by assorted government agencies. It’s trying to put itself in the position to suppress and/or change data on such things as unemployment and inflation that we need to know.  I hope that brave civil servants will be able and willing to protect the integrity of the numbers. Of course, many are being laid off.

 

I thought of this last week when reading of the regime’s plan to disband the Economic Statistics Advisory Committee:

 

So businesses and others may have to increasingly turn to expert private-sector sources, including financial news media,  with their own data-collection systems for actionable economic data, though that would rarely be as sound as the information that used to be collected before the current upheaval.

 

 

Maniacal Marketing

Will hospitals, doctors, dentists, and indeed enterprises, in general, please stop flooding us with post-customer-encounter online surveys?!
 

 

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Ah, America! Millions drive around stoned, but not so stoned they can’t do sports betting on their cell phones. Sometime fascist dictators such as Putin and Viktor Orban have a point when they attack America as “decadent.’’