twin city sidewalks

2010-05-06

Classic Sidewalks of the Silver Screen #30

Eddie Valiant asks "who needs a car in LA?" while he jumps on a streetcar's bumper ...

... in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988).

2010-05-03

Reading the Highland Villager #14-15 (April 14- May 11 Edition)

[Basically, the problem is that the best source of local streets & sidewalks news in Saint Paul is the Highland Villager. This wouldn't be a problem, except that its not available online. I'm reading the Highland Villager so that you don't have to. Until this newspaper goes online, sidewalk information must be set free.]

Total # of articles about sidewalks: 12
Total # of articles about sidewalks written by Jane McClure: 12

Title: Commission airs requests for towering cell phone poles; Debate moves to Edgcumbe as request for 100-foot pole is withdrawn Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: A wireless company wants to put up 100 foot poles in parks in the Groveland and Dayton's Bluff neighborhoods. People don't like it. The planning commission prefers if companies lease things like water towers, rather than putting up new poles. [Update: The commission approved one pole at Griggs St. and one pole at Larpenteur. See meeting notes.]

Title: St Thomas adds more parking to student center plans

Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: Neighborhood concern over the need for lots of street parking means that St Thomas University is building a larger underground ramp (118 spaces) at their new student center on Summit Avenue.

Title: Design of new student center passes muster with HPC; commission also OKs St Thomas pedestrian plan for Cretin-Summit

Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: The Heritage Preservation Commission is forcing St Thomas to add "window details, landscaping, and the detailing for three large service bay doors" to the aforementioned student center. The University will also add a "20-foot pedestrian pad" to the Summit Ave median to improve pedestrian safety. The local advisory council wants more street lighting.

Title: Thune says he has votes to move Jefferson bike boulevard forward; But fellow council member harris still has reservations about $1 million project

Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: The long-debated Bike Boulevard project may get the go ahead, as the votes to move it past the objections of Highland Park Council member Pat Harris may be there. The vote will take place on May 5th [This Wednesday! -ed.] after a public hearing a 4:30 in the council chamber. The money mostly comes from a federal grant. Harris has been pushing not to remove the stoplights and stop signs at a few intersections. Harris also doesn't like the "traffic diverters", which make a 'safe haven' for pedestrians at intersections.

Title: Commission favors Shamrocks' request to rezone Juno Ave. lot

Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: Shamrocks bar on W 7th street wants to create more off-street parking, and the Planning Commission gave the go-ahead to a new surface lot at W7th and Juno Ave.

Title: Plan seeks improved walking, bicycling in Central Corridor

Author: Jane McClure
Short short version: A plan to improve bike and ped pathways along University Ave got the go-ahead from the City Council. [See more of the plan here.]

Title: New vision emerges for Grand-Cleveland; neighbors balk at height of building proposed for site of vacant gas station

Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: There used to be a gas station at Grand and Cleveland, but now a developer wanyts to build a 6 story mixed-use apartment/retail building. The local community council land use committee doesn't like this at all. They want something about 4 story's tall. The article includes a [predictable] quote from a neighbor concerned about parking.

Title: Businesses learn what light-rail construction might be like; Central Corridor planners say they will do the utmost to lessen the impact on University Ave commerce

Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: There was a meeting where planners talked to business owners about the [very unpopular] upcoming construction disruptions. During the first year, the street will be torn up, and one traffic lane and most sidewalks will remain open in each direction. During the second year, the transit stations and tracks will be completed, and because this will take place in the middle of the street, most traffic should not be "impacted".

Title: City sued over PPL's plans for Highland apartment building; neighbors seek to overturn variances approved for the affordable housing project

Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: "Neighbors" are suing the city because they granted variances for a 48-unit affordable housing apartment on W 7th street. [Where the old video store is, west of the Nut Roll factory. -ed.] the complaint calls the approval "irrational, arbitrary, capricious"... etc. [Down with poor people! -ed.]

Title: BZA grants parking variance for new Cheeky Monkey patio

Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: The board of zoning appeals gave a variance for the new sandwich shop on Selby Avenue. Instead of building 29 parking spaces, they only have to build 23. [Parking requirements are really stupid. See below. -ed.]

Title: Testing for lead contamination keeps Oxford ball fields closed

Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: Ballfields next to the park at Lexington and Marshall is being tested for lead. The city has done some testing, and results are 10X higher than the "acceptable level". This may involve a costly cleanup. Nobody knows now the soil got contaminated. [Yikes! -ed.]

Title: City Council considers easing off-street parking requirements

Author: Jane McClure

Short short version: There is a public hearing on May 5th [THIS WEEK!] to discuss lessening the current off-street parking requirements. The current ones have been in place since 1992. The current req's are "based on a subruban model" according to a city planner. The changes will also require larger developments to conduct their own "travel demand management studies". [Long overdue, this. -ed.]

2010-05-02

Minnesota Gubernatorial Portraiture #1

[This content recycled from my now mothballed website, www.excitablemedia.com.]

May Day has finally come and gone, and if you missed it, Scout's Honor you missed the one and only small moment of the calendar (the whole year) where socialist ralles (Viva Fidel!) display themselves undisparaged in the national press. And so it seems like an ideal time to discuss the dire state of international socialism as manifest in these upper reaches of the Midwest, where reds of every stripe have had to stoop to ever more subtle forms of indoctrination. I think you'll find that the latest and greatest example of subtle Marx-related propaganada comes from a surprise ambassador: none other than Minnesota's former Governor, former Navy Seal, and offical member of the Pro Wrestling HOF . . . Jesse "The Body" or "The Mind" [choose one] Ventura.

If you couldn't quite grasp the logical underpinnings of Governor Ventura's distinguished tenure . . . if (somehow) the legislative decisions and bombastic outbursts of the stalwart proletarian followed a political path that eluded even your keen analytic mind . . . well that's because Mr. Ventura had a cleverly disguised socialist agenda, a fact revealed (at last) by the life-size painting now hanging in the basement of the Minnesota State Capitol, right next to the main legislative conference room, directly underneath the world's second largest all-marble dome (after St. Peter's in Rome).

Whatever flash of brilliance inspired former State Leader Ventura's use of Soviet-era Realism for his offical Official Gubernatorial Portrait (OGP) is second only to the curatorial vision which allowed the painting to inhabit the rather staid hallways of the Minnesota State Capitol portrait gallery. Flying in the face of local political conventionality, Ventura's strong embrace of Soviet-era socialist depiction, an aesthetic tradition long oppressed by the art-historical bourgoisie, is noteworthy. And all causes aside, art historians across the globe agree: once again the Mind/Body Phenomenon is up to no good.

A layman's introduction to Soviet Socialist Realism (SSR)

[The most famous bit of SSR propaganda.]

Once Josef Stalin obtained a firm hold on each and every rein of the Bolshevik state-apparatus, he turned his attention to the fine art of propaganda. Needless to say artists are testy, and it took him a while to gain power over the various Bohemian communities that throve in the post-Revolutionary Soviet Union. Once he had gulaged a few squeaky wheels, however, Stalin intiated a remarkable run of artistic propaganda breaks-through. Poster production, for example, was eventually directed by the Central Committee's Department of Agitation and Mass Campaigns, and they helped create some of the finest revolutionary poster art the world had ever seen. (They called it poster-modernism.) Similar movements revolutionized the filmmaking and music industries, and we can now thank Soviet state control for the likes of Sergei Eisenstein and Dimitri Shostakovich.

The real breakthrough though came in the field of painting, particularly the stable of artists who created the school now known as Soviet Socialist Realism. Content-wise, the major SSR works importantly anticipated American pop sensibilities, mythologizing a "language of the everyday" decades before Warhol. The ageless content belied a more old-fashioned formal technique, which remained grounded in a realism that contrasted starkly with its contemporaneous, porcine Capitalist visual art movements.

Jesse's Movement

[Nobody ever knew what Ventura was really thinking]

The commission for the OGP went to a life-long friend of Ventura's, an "artistic" comrade from his early wrestling career. While not commonly known, Ventura had showed marked Marxist tendencies early in his youth, and though scholars are divided along typical ideological lines, some notable academics speculate that Ventura based his early wrestling work on the principles outlined in Theodor Adorno's famous essay, "Proletariat Piledrivers, Bourgouisie Bodyslams."

What is clear is that Mr. Ventura's first wrestling persona, a figure named "Steel Head," wore a monochromatic red jumpsuit. Steel Head, along with his tag-team partner, "Supreme Leader," were a common sight in local and regional circuits, and we can only speculate about whether they were fighting for "International Working Class Solidarity" or for more prosaic concepts like "money." The duo fit neatly into the Sylvester-Stallone-in-Rocky III-fueled era, and its unbending desire for sacrifial martyrdom. Quickly, Ventura and his shadowy partner became the big bad-guy fish in their small wrestling pond, and were known to ogling lewdly old women in the audience, take candy from babies, &c. They provided regular fodder for more jingostic tag-teams such as "The Armed Forces" and "AWKYA" (trans. America Will Kick Your Ass).

[Here we see Ventura's sublimated homosexual desire, channeled and subservient to the demands of the state as reflected in his meathook resting firmly on the statuary of the famed French sensualist, Auguste Rodin. Ventura (trans. fearless leader) restrains the naked desire of the people, supported as always by the infrastructure of the state apparatus behind him.]

Biographcal details seem to disappear around the same time that Ventura broke up with his first partner, and abandoned Steel Head for the more conventional "Jesse The Body." It was around this same time that he tried his hand at acting, appearing in such films as Running Man and Abraxas: Defender of the Universe, both fine examples of mid-1980s science fiction.

Sadly I'm reminded of that old French saying that roughly translates: "If you're not a socialist when you're young, you have no heart. If you're not a capitalist when you're old, you have no head," but geriatric Socialists looking for a silver lining in the cloudy surrender to market forces that is Ventura's life story, can find it today in the SSR stylings of his gubernatorial portrait.

I ain't got time to bleed the capitalist oppressor

The work itself was painted by Stephen Cepello, a friend of Ventura's from the early days, a man long noted for his delvings into modern socalist realistic technique, if such a thing can even be said to exist. Note how the artist has emphazied Ventura's bald head and steely gaze, directly mirroring the stern authoritative look from the famous SSR portrait of Lenin speaking to an assembled Mayday mass. Note further the cigar clutched in Ventura's weighty paw, not only a surrogate for his reknowned potency but also a nod to Castro, whom Ventura greatly admired. (Jesse would often dress like Fidel, apeing his mannerisms, travelling by SUV, clutching his ubiquitious Cuban stogie.)

[The restructured capitol building is a stand in for Das Kapital, Marx's masterful critique of industrial society. The artist reconfigures the three-part symmetry of Cass Gilbert's original design into a homogeneous landmark that parallels the formal structure of the Marx & Engels tome.]

The iconography of the remainder of the portriat is a testament to latency revealed, and so mirrors the ancient Russian tradition of icon creation, its symbolism almost as heavy-handed as Ventura's political bravado. Behind the Governor's bald noggin' lurk temptestual skies, calling to mind Ventura's Independence Party's turbulent (unending) struggle to overthrow the oppressive ruling classes. Likewise, the open field on the river bluff reminds the specatator of the simple farm-fresh foundations that underlie the Midwestern proletariat.

What effect Ventura's bold artistic stroke has on political socialism locally is still unknown. Ventura himself has moved on, taking up residency in the People's Republic of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is actively passing along the techniques of political agitation to the next generation at Harvard University. He's said to be a "cult figure" on campus, with a cadre of devoted followers. All I can say is that if I lived anywhere near Boston, I'd be stockpiling non-pershibles.