A Time to Blush

Today is the anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing. Meanwhile, the situation in Boston is out of control.  So as many people that I care about are remembering the ways in which we were changed forever, another set of people I care about is seeing their own city changed forever. So this is a heavy day. And it should be. It's the kind of day when we are bombarded with stimuli that should make us want to turn away, and yet, with our twenty-first century addiction to the twenty-four hour news cycle and social media, with our movie-mania-desensitization, many of us are instead transfixed.

A couple days ago, a photo collage featuring gory pictures from the Boston Marathon finish line went viral. It was composed of pictures of bloody streets from varying distances and, most notably, a picture of a man with the bottom half if his leg missing, his femur exposed to the open air. My father, a now retired twenty-five year veteran of the Oklahoma City Police Department, and former Crime Scene Investigator, tried to remind others of the tastelessness of such pictures going public. He reminded us, in not o gentle terms, of the fact that such photos are disrespectful to the victims and their families and added, "I spent a career taking these kinds of photos, and I don't care to relive the experience on facebook." To my chagrin (I've reached an age where I feel responsible for protecting my parents, so I feel righteous anger about this) he actually received some flack for his hard line, including one passive aggressive questioning of his masculinity (of the type common on Facebook--that is, which may or may not have been directed specifically at him). Such a suggestion is a clear sign to me that many people just don't get it.

To my father, a police officer, and to my step-father, a firefighter, and finally to me, a second generation police officer myself, there is great honor, humility,  and a sense of gravitas in knowing that seeing these kinds of things is part of the sacrifice we make. Both of those men, the two most important men in my life, bear both the physical and emotional scars of April 19, 1995. In fact, I am often telling people that all first responder suffer from some level of PTSD; to what extent is only a matter of degree. But those of us with the introspection to be aware of it take a tremendous amount of pride in the fact that we run toward things others run from, and take care of things that others can not--and should not. We see things that humans are not supposed to see in order to shield others from it. And we take that responsibility seriously.

You see, humans aren't supposed to see horrible things happen to other humans. It's against the way we are wired. It does, despite our imagined toughness, effect us. Which is why, for decades, the media edited such horrible images. Consider the highly anesthetized newsreel footage from the Second World War:

To us, this footage may seem unrealistic, even sweetly quant. We may, God forbid, even see this as a sign of how much more "with it" we are in our generation, how much more realistic and world wise we are. But do we really think we were tougher than the Greatest Generation? This is a generation who lived through the Depression, the Dust Bowl, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the most politically complex and technological war in human history. These videos aren't designed this way because this generation lacked toughness or wisdom, but because it possessed humanity and a basic sense of proper revulsion.

To this generation, one tried to hide that which should not be seen by others. It's not that people watching at the theater didn't know that what was happening "over there" was horrifically violent; the stars hanging in their neighbors windows would have stood as a constant reminder of this. It's that they knew that these were not things to be witnessed. For them, it was improper that the president should be seen in a wheel chair. Twenty years later, it was improper that a president's brain matter and skull should be seen in TV (The first time I saw the Zapruder film without blurring to hide the president's fatal injury was when my dad was teaching a forensics class. Not long after, the History Channel began showing the film unedited--a move I took as a sign that something important had happened--things had shifted.)

My minister friend, Ryan, tells a story to his youth group to emphasize the extent to which our own desensitization has cost us some of our humanity. As he drove one day, he saw an accident at the side of the road. He looked to the driver's seat of one of the cars, where he saw an injured woman from whom, "blood was flowing out." Ryan though, wow, that's bad, and drove on. He made it a few blocks when he suddenly felt overwhelming shame. He had just seen a horribly injured woman, and the most he could think was, wow that's bad. It cost him nothing, barely even slowing down his commute.  He had felt no emotion. It hadn't bothered him that he had just witnessed the suffering of another human being. And that shamed him. It should cost us when another person suffers. It should bother us. He stopped the car and prayed, both for her, and for himself.

You see, we need to feel revolted. Because revulsion suggests that we understand the human cost of these violent tragedies. The people in these photographs are not actors, they are not objects for our own voyeuristic catharsis. They are not bloody puppets in an Artaudian play. They are human beings in incredible pain. They are someone's wife, husband, son, daughter, mother, father. They are people who will be dealing with these scars, both physical and emotional, forever--not just until the screen fades and the credits roll. 

So, when my father lectures about the insensitivity of posting these pictures, people would be wise to listen. He speaks from hard earned experience about the tolls this violence takes on a human being. My call to any of us who still can, on this day in which we remember what happened in 1995 and pray for what's happening in 2013, is to keep what my two dads have lost. Keep your ability to blush.

Building Quality Community in Downtown OKC

I spent today at the Placemaking Conference hosted by the Institute for Quality Communities at OU. The highlight of the day, for me, was the presentation by Jeff Speck, one of the keynote speakers for the conference and author of Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time. Speck argues that improving downtown by improving walkability is the key to better communities. Toward the end of his presentation, he addresses the objections he sometimes gets from community members from poorer neighborhoods who ask why improvements should focus on downtown rather than on their neighborhoods. After all, they want improvements to the places where they actually live. Speck's answer to this is entirely reasonable.

Speck argues that, since any renewal plan can't improve every neighborhood, it is best to do one small area very well than to spread resources and make a large area mediocre. For this reason, it makes sense to focus first on downtown, since this is the one part of the city that belongs to everyone.

In Speck's vision of community space, this is certainly true. As a proponent of what is often called New Urbanism, Speck's vision of good public space is emphatically mixed use (I think I may be quoting Kunstler here), pedestrian friendly, and scaled to humans (rather than to automobiles). Its borders are permeable, it's buildings interesting, and its aesthetics welcoming. It is truly democratic space where members of all classes intermingle and watch one another.

In contrast to Speck's optimistic vision, however, Mike Davis, in the essay "Fortress Los Angeles" from his book City of Quartz, presents an alternate view of downtown as purposefully constructed space. In the picture Davis draws, downtown does not, in fact, belong to everyone.

Davis recounts the "urban renaissance" of Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s during which time the city underwent a serious makeover, mainly focused, it would seem, with making the educated middle class feel comfortable by insulating them from people they don't want to see. The most insidious of these "improvements" was the city's "experiments with community blockades." In a move that created de-fact ghettos (in the old meaning of the word), the city surrounded neighborhoods supposedly infested with drugs with concrete blockades in order to disrupt the flow of cocaine. But it also disrupted the flow of service industry workers into service industry jobs. It disrupted the flow of anyone living in the neighborhood to get out.

Though the blockades were being used in more suburban neighborhoods, moving downtown doesn't mean that the designs become less oppressive, just that the messages have to be a bit more subtle. There are without question, ways to make certain people feel uncomfortable in a place--to make sure they understand the signs that they are not welcome. Davis explains:

Ramparts and battlements, reflective glass and elevated pedways, are tropes in an architectural language warning off the underclass Other. Although architectural critics are usually blind to this militarized syntax, urban pariah groups--whether young black men, poor Latino immigrants, or elderly homeless females--read the signs immediately.

Disenfranchised groups have learned, often through bitter experience, the vocabularies of built space. They've learned to looks around and know that they are not wanted. For the homeless man, "No Trespassing" signs, blocked walkways, public park closing hours, and benches designed to make it impossible to sleep on them all work to tell him that he is not wanted.

Impractical "armrests" on OKC park benches make it impossible for homeless people to sleep.

If you are middle class and white, you may well find the huge police presence in Bricktown comforting. If you're young and not white, you likely find it a bit disconcerting.

There's great incentive for a city to make sure that the middle class will feel comfortable. After all, we have to pay for these improvements, and we pay for these improvements with the revenue that they generate. So, if a city allows the economics of building communities to take precedence over the human needs of all those living in the community, it becomes easy cater to those whose money is financing the improvements. The problem with the superblocks in LA, Detroit, and Atlanta that Davis mentions was primarily that they were designed to insulate the people they were designed for. A person working in one of these can easily leave home, seal herself in her car for the drive to work, park in a garage that is connected directly to the office building, and never cross paths with someone outside of her own socioeconomic milieu.

Such an arrangement is decidedly un-democratic. In such a model, downtown does not belong to everyone, but only to those whose comfort is profitable.

So, it's important for those of us who concern ourselves with social justice, and economic and racial diversity to remain closely involved and aware of public discussions of community building. If we see downtown as our most democratic public space (and I think Speck is right to), we must work to make sure that everyone is, in fact, invited.

Universal Trashcan Theory: an Argument for Littering

This is an argument for littering. Hear me out. It's a bit satirical, obviously, but it's also valuable enough to consider at face value.

When I was a college student, I got my first teaching job as children's music director at a suburban OKC church. On Saturdays, I would ride around with the youth minister, meeting with kids who ride the bus and their parents to find out which kids would be on the bus in the morning (part of the idea was that coming to visit them would make the commit to coming). We had an active bus ministry, picking kids up and dropping kids off all over the metro area, so our Saturdays visiting kids and parents were long days.  My minister friend would stop for a candy bar and a soda and eat a snack on the road. When he finished, he would crack his window, toss his empty wrappers out and say, "universal trashcan theory." This was a kind of inside joke that, for my friend, never got old. He said that, according to his Universal Trashcan Theory, there would actually be less of a trash problem if, instead of piling all of our trash in one place, we would just spread it around--if everyplace was our trashcan. Of course, it was really just a tongue-in-cheek way for a church youth minister to justify littering. I always found the joke, and the littering, immature and, even as a then young conservative, I found it to be insidiously bad stewardship of the planet.

But as I've thought about it lately, I've decided that he might be on to something. Obviously, it doesn't make us less covered in garbage of we spread it out (as my friend's theory suggested). Rather, it does the opposite. What it would do, and what maybe we need, is make us more aware of our garbage.

When I open up and eat my individually wrapped apple sauce cup and throw it away, I don't have to think about it again. It becomes part of the nebulous pile in my kitchen waste bin until I take it out. Then, once a week, a paid city worker shows up at my house, often before I'm even awake, and takes it away for me. From there, it goes to a well secured site on the outskirts of the city in areas where most of us never go, and they do things with our trash that we don't quite understand (which mostly involves the low tech process of covering it with dirt and high tech processes that keep the decomposing garbage from flowing into ground water).

Through this process of taking our trash and hiding it from us, we are insulated from our own impact on our environment. We can eat mandarin oranges out of a plastic cup with a plastic fork, drink water out of a plastic bottle,  eat a sandwich out of a plastic baggie, eat tuna from a can packaged in a box with a plastic spoon and foil mayonnaise wrapper. Then I can forget that all this packaging even exists. A one cent per dollar sales tax takes care of this for me. I don't have to be confronted with my own growing pile of garbage, because I don't have to live with it.

If, on the other hand, we stop putting our trash in a blue container where it magically disappears, we instead throw it out the window into the neighborhood in which we live, we suddenly must live with the choice we make between a tupperware box and an individual apple sauce cup. As the Starbucks cups start to pile up on the corner, I'll be forced to decide whether or not I ought to just sit down and drink from a porcelain cup. (do they even offer those anymore?)

I'm not a tree-hugging hippie. But I've become increasingly aware that every time I cook dinner, I'm amazed at how much packaging I throw away. Every box I open contains three bags. And I throw all these away. Every time I go to Dunkin' Donuts (which, is like, a lot), I throw away a Styrofoam cup that will decompose sometime after kingdom-come. A college friend of my wife's from Finland used to talk about how amazed she was that everything here comes in disposable packages. In Finland, she explained, people would find this incredibly wasteful. We are addicted to disposable packaging. Of course, just because something is disposable doesn't mean that when I throw it away it's actually disposed of. It's just being moved to somewhere where I don't have to see it anymore.

So, instead, let's force ourselves to see it. Instead of moving it to some man-made no man's land, let's drop it in our own neighborhood. Because, and this is my revised Universal Trashcan Theory, if my neighborhood becomes my trashcan, maybe I'll think more carefully about what I throw away.

Memorabilia Mobile

If you've ever seen this truck tooling around town, it has no doubt caught your eye. I've seen it several times, and I've wondered who drives such a thing and why. It's like a rolling episode of hoarders, except that it's somehow got a method--and (this is my favorite part) it's all baseball stuff. There's equipment, signs, stickers, action figures, and even a Jar Jar Binks in a Cardinal's jersey.

Today, as I was driving down the section of Western near Bishop McGuiness, I saw the truck parked in front of one of the antique stores that line this section of Western. Intrigued (and needing something to write about) I cruised the block two or three times until I saw a man walking out of the store and toward the truck. Knowing this must be the owner, I turned back around. By the time I got my car parked, he was no longer in sight.

So, I knocked on the door to the camper, taking a chance that this guy might be a little off-center, and may not like being bothered. But the man who answered the door was not at all bothered, or even surprised, that some stranger would come knocking. He invited me in, and, still not sure what to think, I accepted his invitation.

As it turns out, Bill Patterson is not a nut job at all. He's a heat and air man who coached baseball for three decades before semi-retiring to his own heat and air business. His truck, which is a rolling expression of his love for the game he used to coach, doubles as a work truck and vacation home.

When work is busy (as it is now, with the cold weather knocking everyone's heat out), the camper is filled with the tools and equipment he needs to service HVAC systems. In fact, this is what he was doing at the antique shop.

During the summer, on the other hand, the Norman resident takes the tools out, puts the mattress back in, and travels around with his three dogs visiting ballparks and sleeping in the camper. He has traveled to every major league ballpark in the US and in Canada, and has even attended a game in Mexico City, all in this rig.

As he goes, he picks up memorabilia to add to his forty year collection.

He began this odd way of collecting when he kept an old work truck when he was coaching. He began collecting baseball related stickers, "the kind of stuff you see at Love's Country Store and places like that." Then, one day, a friend and he came across a baseball themed metal sign. He bought it, and his friend objected, asking "what are you going to do with that?" "I'm going to screw it to my truck," he said. And thus began his rolling collection.

The truck attracts attention everywhere Bill goes. People pull up next to him on the interstate to snap photos and, he says, "I just wave." He's even been chased down by Tulsa World reporter John Clanton, who followed him for miles to interview him. An avid Cardinals fan, he met his son, who is a soldier at Ft. Bragg, in St. Louis when they were in the World Series two seasons ago. They couldn't get tickets, so they parked the truck and enjoyed the atmosphere, tailgating style. They left the truck for a few minutes and returned to find it surrounded by people taking photos and even a TV crew from the St. Louis Fox affiliate, who ultimately did a two and a half minute story on him and his truck. He said he's got the internet address for the story written down somewhere, but, he says,"it's a shame, because I've never touched a computer."

Patterson notes that though he's been so many places, and during the World Series he parked his truck in crime ridden east St Louis, no one has ever stolen anything from the truck. People just love it.

Perhaps my favorite moment in the conversation was when, having told him that I too was a baseball fan, he gave the secret midwinter greeting among baseball fans frustrated with cold weather: "Pitchers and catchers in two weeks."

William Patterson lets me keep him from his job long enough to photograph him with his truck.

Debut Post: Celebrating The Seedy

In 2004, one hundred years after Times Square in New York was named for the newspaper that made it's headquarters there, Times author Adam Gopnik wrote "Times Regained: How the Old Times Square Was Made New."  Disguised as a book review, the article is both a celebration and a lament about how Times Square was remade from the squalor of 70's into the "neon daisy" commercial center of New York that it is today.

For Gopnik, and for the authors he reviews, there is no doubt that something had to be done about the state of Times Square in the 1970's. Violent crime was rampant in the street lined with porn shops and adult theaters. So, the Gap and Toys R Us, the news networks with their street side studios, and the chain restaurants are all, in some ways, a necessary improvement over the dangerous square of the 70's. Yet, for these authors, something is no doubt lost in the new Times Square. As Gopnik notes, "where once Times Square was hot, it is now cold, where once varied, now uniform, where once alive, now dead." He later explains:

. . .there is something spooky about the contemporary Times Square. . .One of the things that make for vitality in any city, and above all in New York, is the trinity of big buildings, bright lights, and weird stores. The big buildings and bright lights are there in the new Times Square, but the weird stores are not.

Gopnik's lament is that when urban renewal comes, it necessarily sweeps away some of the soul that comes with the seedy stuff, the odd local characters who own the weird stores, the vitality of the unapproved art of the underclasses, the beautiful strangeness of urbanity.

Here in Oklahoma City, we are rather famously going through a Renaissance of our own. In the aggregate, this is no doubt a good thing. We are remaking ourselves as a vibrant, first class American city, one that those of us who grew up here can finally be proud of. But at what cost?

No doubt, a little something was lost when Deep Deuce was transformed from a bunch of high density, low rent housing, into the incredibly expensive condos that stand there now. The old Deep Deuce was a place where, during the early years of my father's police career, the police department was working a stabbing almost weekly. But it was also the place where a thriving jazz scene had once hosted Benny Goodman (who moved a performance to a club on NE 2nd street from the Belle Isle Theme Park when the park told him that his black musicians would not be able to play there), and which gave birth to the career of Charlie Christian. And even as hipster creep revitalizes the 23rd street corridor, it pushes out places like Mother's (the iconic florist/head shop), the curiosity shops masquerading as antique stores, and the palm readers with the neon hands in their windows. It is these things, not the chain restaurants, hotels, and tourist attractions, that give life to a city for people who actually live there. It is these things and the characters who run them and patronize them that give a place its sense of local character. It is the places ignored by city planners and MAPS initiatives that make our city wonderfully strange. These places need a champion.

And so this blog won't talk much about Bricktown, or the National Memorial, or the other things we've done that anesthetize our hometown into a touristy, convention friendly midwestern city. Instead, the purpose of this blog is to celebrate those disappearing gems that give the city its character. It is to highlight the strange, the gritty, and the seedy stuff that gave Oklahoma City its beautiful urbanity, its seedy soul, even before we labelled ourselves "big league."