Defending the barely defensible, or when a "chorus of opinions" translates into Christianity alone.

Amid the editor's recitation of "a lot of voices," I see no mention of the two weekly Christian religion columnists, Tom May and Nancy Kennedy, who have been running in the pages of the Jeffersonville newspaper for quite some time now.

May gets an additional "general interest" column placement, which often hints at the religious point of view. It's difficult to accept exculpatory pleas of "a lot of voices" when one guy gets two shots.

ON THE AVENUES: Welcome to "Pagan Life," a weekly column devoted to heathens, infidels, idolaters, atheists, non-theists, irreligious people, agnostics, skeptics, heretics and apostates.

If in fact the object of the local chain newspaper's guest column strategy is to offer a diversity of opinion, when does this noble goal extend to the practice of religion?

After all, there are a good many more religious perspectives than Christianity alone, as well as the equally compelling points of view afforded by those with no religious orientation whatever.

But wait.

I've just now searched the newspaper's cluttered on-line portal and see that no religion columns have appeared there since October. Are they still running in the print copies, obscured by the shadow of your parakeet?

Could it be my prayers have been answered? I doubt it, but a skeptic can dream, and as he does, note also the absence of African American and Latino voices from the roster.

DUNCAN COLUMN: A chorus of opinions, by Susan Duncan (Mostly Jeffersonville News and Tribune)

 ... Back to our former reader. She wrote in her letter, “There is only one Author that writes for you that is worth reading and that is Lindon Dodd.”

Well, I like Lindon’s writing, too. He can be funny, thoughtful, irreverent and more. But I believe many of our other columnists — likely she’s referencing them, as opposed to reporters who also write — have merit and are worth your time to read.

Chris Morris’ writing is replete with homespun Southern Indiana charm. Erin Thompson adds her savvy mom perspective. Terry Stawar entertains and educates. Barb Anderson challenges us to be our better selves. Amanda Beam brings both spunk and heart to her tales. Terry Cummins weaves a lesson or two into each column. Newcomer Mike Matthews brings us together. The descriptions from another Mike, Lunsford, make everyday happenings relatable. So, too, are the musings of Tom May from his view in the Catbird Seat. And we occasionally run columns by Mark Bennett, who gets to the heart of what’s important in life.

We also publish guest columns from current and former elected officials, including U.S. Sen. Todd Young, U.S. Rep. Trey Hollingsworth, and Congressman Lee Hamilton. Two of those men are Republicans, and when Democrat Hamilton was in the U.S. House, he reached across the aisle so much he created a bridge for comprise.

Other periodic columnists include Leo Morris, John Krull, Mary Beth Schneider, Shane Phipps, Bill Ketter, Kelly Hawes and Brian Howey, all more politically oriented with a statewide or national focus. Why? They add variety and cause us to evaluate our own opinions on the issues before us.

That’s a lot of voices. I add my own to the chorus sometimes, tackling issues or encouraging more intentional living ...

Henry Bain's New Albany: Finally, a genuine Bicentennial triumph.

We caught the Sunday afternoon matinee of Henry Bain's New Albany, as performed at St. Mark's. As I strongly suspected going in, the play is an undisputed high point of the "paint by numbers in shades of muted beige" bicentennial celebration we've been forced to endure in 2013.

It's worth noting that in Larry Muhammad's script, African-American characters in the year 1913 find themselves excluded from the centennial planning process, and respond by devising their own civic birthday celebration.

Was the committee of officious commissars in 2013 any more representative than those of 1913? Judge for yourself. The current century's insular group of civic pillars arguably includes more women and African-Americans, but its special bureaucratic talent has been the exclusion en masse of differing ideas and their troublesome bearers.

Seeing as NAC persists in dating New Albany's founding not from the arrival of the Scribners, but the town's legal incorporation in 1817, this means we have ample time to plan The Peoples Bicentennial, to be observed in 2017. Meanwhile, here's a snippet from the play ...

Great Day Live Video: "Henry Bain's New Albany"(WHAS)

 ... and one recipe for mimicking the famous Henry Bain sauce.

Henry Bain sauce is a sweet-sour-spicy beef sauce invented by a maitre d' at Louisville's all-male Pendennis Club in the early 20th century.

· 1 (17-ounce) jar Major Grey's chutney
· 1/2 of 9-ounce jar imported pickled walnuts (optional, see note)
· 1 (14-ounce) bottle ketchup
· 1 (11-ounce) bottle A-1 Steak Sauce
· 1 (10-ounce) bottle Worcestershire sauce
· 1 (12-ounce) bottle chili sauce
· Tabasco, to taste

Put the chutney and walnuts, if using, in a blender and chop fine or puree as you prefer (you'll need to stop and stir). Combine with other ingredients and season to taste with Tabasco.

Makes 4 pints.

Serve with hot or cold roast beef. Spread on beef sandwiches, serve with pot roast, etc. Also good served with cream cheese as a cracker spread.

Note: Pickled walnuts are recommended in the Henry Bain sauce recipe in``The Farmington Cookbook,'' but not in recipes written by former Louisville food writers Cissy Gregg and Marion Flexner.

Another insular Bicentennial high point manages to exclude most of city.

We decided to visit the River City Winery on Thursday evening, and following the usual Camm Trial pleasantries and analysis, became aware that yet another self-congratulatory bicentennial gathering of usual suspects was in progress. This proved to be the official unveiling of a Barney Bright sculpture, as commandeered and donated by PNC bank. The sparse crowd's remnants are depicted in this cellular photo, one that frankly captures far more than I originally intended. The looming edifice of Mount Socialist Bloc on the horizon adds perspective to a scene in which the sculpture itself is quite tiny, and many of the personages surrounding it commensurately over-inflated. Let's hope the deftly chilled rotgut champagne and daintily stacked benedictine sandwiches were tasty. The winery's pizza sure was.

BARNEY BRIGHT SCULPTURE UNVEILING - BICENTENNIAL PARK

Join The Arts Council of Southern Indiana and the City of New Albany in celebrating the unveiling of "Landscape", the famous artwork by renowned Louisville sculptor Barney Bright. The piece was donated by PNC and will be placed in the New Bicentennial Park.

Champagne and desserts will be provided by the Horseshoe Foundation of Floyd County.

CM Caesar issues call: Save our Pearl Street from the free-love, two-way drunken pergressives ... arm yourselves with white bread ... don't be scared to use it!

Pedaling: It's okay, but only in the past tense, bicentennially speaking.

Another day, another instance of obliviousness on the part of the bicentennial commission.

Do I really need to spell this out? Again? How many times has it been?

Okay, I will ... just for the record, ma'am.

The bicentennial commission thinks it's peachy keen to gawk at vintage bicycles from the past. Meanwhile, its membership is barely cognizant of biking in the present, much less bearing any record of comprehending or promoting two-wheeling in the future.

Most everything about New Albany's bicentennial celebration must be viewed as wasted opportunities. CeeSaw and Shelle ordained that all of it must take place in a safely sanitized, distant, scrubbed-clean past. Nothing must refer to a future tense; in more diverse hands, we might have had a year-long forum on the future. Instead, we've had stale white bread from the Same.Old.Suspects.

Meanwhile, the newspaper happily reports on bicycles of the past, as I search in vain for coverage of last week's workshop on bike commuting -- and mentions the word "future" in the header, in spite of its perpetual absence, and with no discernible sense of irony.

Dentistry is necessary, because in New Albany, thinking people spend too much time grinding their teeth. Go here to learn about the bicycle commuting workshop.

Pedaling the past into the future, by Darian Eswine (New and Tribune)

NEW ALBANY — Traveling through downtown New Albany on Sunday afternoon, a strange sight was seen as a giant wheel came rolling across the street, pedaled by a man dressed in period costume. He was followed by a parade of similarly dressed people on old bicycles.

The Vintage Bike Parade and Exhibit is one of the many events held this year to celebrate New Albany's 200th birthday, and it was only fitting the event began in the new Bicentennial Park at the corner of Spring and Pearl streets.

ON THE AVENUES: Walk on dead men.

ON THE AVENUES: Walk on dead men.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Yesterday was the 79th day of 2013, and it was my 70th day outside, walking for at least half an hour and often more. Most of these walks have been round trip jaunts from my house on Spring Street through downtown New Albany’s historic core.

This regimen has been intended to keep me active until it warms enough for biking, but it has been such a pleasant change of pace that a modified version of it is likely to continue throughout the year in conjunction with the two-wheeler. The overall plan is to be more regularly active, because exercise makes the good beer taste even better – almost like a reward, if you will.

Sadly I’m reminded that March walks in New Albany can be a difficult undertaking, not so much physically, but in terms of reduced human morale. This particular city, and probably many others like it, is best viewed when conditions are ideal. It is never more unattractive than in March, when the coldest weather already has passed and the growing season hasn’t yet arrived.

Until the greenery comes, one can clearly see every blemish and imperfection – the unkempt houses, the doggie droppings, and the voluminous garbage strewn seemingly everywhere.

There’s no mistaking: It’s depressing. We take it for granted that we’re a modern society – although I harbor no delusions pertaining to “enlightenment,” and what is meant by “modern” usually remains safely unexamined – and yet glancing around, one can’t help wondering whether New Albany’s chronic Battered City Syndrome (thanks, GC) is just too pervasive to be shaken.

And so I always think while walking: New Albany is 200 years old. Was it always this way?

---

To know me is to understand my longstanding fascination with history.

When we stopped by the Carnegie Center last weekend to view the “Artists of Wonderland Way” exhibit, the paintings almost were secondary. I wanted to know more about the artists – their lives, times and stories. I wanted to know what this place was like when they were in their primes, and how they felt about it.

Back then, was there hope for a reasonable civic future, or did the low common denominator we tolerate (exalt?) in this present, benighted millennium suffice for them as absently as it does for us?

The answer’s probably obvious. Times change quickly, and people grudgingly.

One of my favorite modular phrases of late comes in handy, one restating Pogo’s most famous axiom: New Albany doesn’t have a (fill in the blank with annoyance) problem; it has a resident problem. Yes, the phrase is too cynically glib by half, but my guess is that even before World War I, frustrated New Albanians were muttering it amid the stasis.

Getting back to the art of the stroll (and the bike), walking affords ample time for reflection, and while the moments are filled with the usual ruminations on work and play, this botched bicentennial year has had me thinking about the uses of the past.

Most of us possess a personal narrative, a chronology of depleted years we’ve lived through, and of course our editorial attitude toward their recitation can be quite subjective. Some people actively erase their memories, often for very good reason. Why relive rotten times?

Others obsess over events and episodes, affixing artificially enhanced impact to their recollections. My own ghosts are many and varied, and words like “shoulda, woulda, coulda” bubble to the surface on occasion, but through it all, I try to stick to the task at hand and keep matters in my world moving forward.

Insofar as historical perspective assists this imperative, I indulge it. Some times it’s more useful, albeit it challenging, to make a clean break and innovate.

---

As an individual consumed with history, I harbor no intrinsic objections to the notion of historical preservation. Generally speaking, I support it. At the same time, it strikes me that any unquestioned doctrine merits periodic surgical strikes of skepticism, and in the context of New Albany in the current age, there’s always room for ample doubt.

So it is that I keep asking myself and others: Why has the city’s bicentennial celebration thus far been so predictably, infuriatingly white-bread mundane, attitudinally speaking?

Maybe it’s because the past, while fascinating, also can be an 800-lb gorilla wearing a conceptual straitjacket. It can be re-interpreted, and these shadings actually change as time passes, because without learning from experience, what point is there? Still, overall, the historical record is fixed. It is what it was; for one to become immersed in it to the exclusion of future possibilities is like keep a foot clamped on the brake even after the light changes.

Somehow, for all my skepticism, and in spite of the March uglies, I remain convinced that the life and times of New Albany can be better and more expansive than this.

I believe New Albany can have nice things, new as well as old, though not just what the old persist in thinking is new, when it isn’t.

I believe that we actually can think our way through a wet beer label and grasp the modern world, in addition to respecting our history. Let’s have it all for a change.

I believe, contrary to the usual conditioned socio-economic responses and cultural proclivities, that older dogs can indeed learn newer tricks – and be a better animal for it.

New Albany’s not the only burg in the world where business “as usual,” blood feuds and certain fixed firmaments of the remote past tend to make progress toward the future more difficult. It’s just that I live and work here, and not in another burg somewhere else in the world. Hence, the chronology of my shtick.

New Albany doesn’t have to be the state of mind wherein focusing on remembering the past has the unintended consequence of constantly repeating the same mistakes. The present is its own future historical moment, isn’t it?

Can we please get started on it?

ON THE AVENUES: Welcoming Their Hatred.

ON THE AVENUES: Welcoming Their Hatred. 

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Profundity on demand is a skill residing somewhere outside my daily job description. Incisiveness takes time and sobriety, neither of them allies in my present configuration.

So it is that with a presidential election to be decided next week – the 2016 campaign promptly begins on Wednesday morning, folks – there is nothing I conceivably might write that would close any books, rest the case or knock “it” out of the park. That’s because you made up your minds a long time ago, as far back as early childhood, and what actually happens to determine a “choice” when the ballot is pressed into your hands as an adult is a phenomenon far more Pavlovian than Republican or Democratic.

With all the arguments having been made ad nauseam, or better yet, advertising nausea, my observations today shall be confined to the personal and immediate.

---

It is by no means an original thought that Americans have divided themselves into increasingly agitated camps, the likes of which we’ve seldom witnessed since pre-Civil War times. This is an unsettling omen, considering the improved modes of murder enthusiastically developed during the 147 years since Appomattox. A recent article in the New York Times attempted to provide an explanation, geographically.

Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family.

Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with international cooperation and engagement, secularism and science, gun control, individual freedom in culture and sexuality, and a greater role for the government in protecting the environment and ensuring economic equality.

Nature or nurture? It’s a question that won’t go away. Since we don’t talk any more, my guess is that it will remain on the table. The Bookseller recommended a book, and when I’m finished reading Chuck Thompson’s “Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession,” there’ll be a report. Until then, homework for those pulling the Romney lever is to view Ken Burns’s videos about the Civil War, and refresh your memories as to what brought us here. You badly need it.

---

I refrained from watching the presidential debates, preferring to monitor their inevitable regress in the post-modern way, through Twitter. Once there, it was heartening to find virtually everyone I follow was in perfect lock-step agreement with my own point of view.

Hmm, I wonder why?

At any rate, once each debate concluded, each of us proceeded directly to our favored blogs and the shambolic remnants of what used to be called “news” organizations, where we absorbed which candidate “won,” all the while absolved from examining any pre-conceived notions with respect to ideas that accidentally might have strayed into the game show format.

Let’s face it: Those participating in campaign set pieces find exactly what they need to buttress what they already believed, anyway. Few humans past pre-school experience epiphanies out of thin air, because there are so many more subconscious influences layered beneath the surface than rational ones requiring patient thought, and as yet awaiting clarification.

Of course, we’re periodically capable of incredible feats of transcendence, pole-vaulting deep-seated, ingrained behaviors amassed during early periods of our development -- just not very often, and seldom convincingly.

---

As this seemingly endless election campaign has approached its temporary conclusion, I’ve thought quite a lot about my own process of socialization. How was I raised? Educated? What were my formative experiences? What was learned? Forgotten? Which bits inform my everyday life as an adult, and which of them are hidden? How much of it did I accept, and reject?

Indeed, I’ve tended towards a certain qualified rebelliousness. I look out into the world and locate persons and ideas that annoy me, often after first exploring them from the inside, and then find or formulate whatever is necessary to irritate them in due measure. If you don’t believe it, just ask Develop New Albany.

For the longest time, I underwent an ongoing, internalized existential debate: Which condition offends me worst, the powerless among us being exploited by the powerful, or the powerless accepting exploitation without fighting back?

The current presidential campaign wasn’t necessary for me to arrive at an answer, but it has confirmed my verdict: In America, power is money, and neither power nor money is on the side of those angels I prefer to call my own. Like hamsters on a treadmill, the exploited are kept constantly running. It isn’t always possible for them to fight back, or to lift themselves by Ayn Rand’s bra straps. Equal opportunity and Bain are antonyms. And so on. But it still strikes me how few of my brethren have reached the same conclusion, when unlike me, they still dabble at being Christian.

Jesus as a one-percenter? Give me a break.

---

In terms of my cohort, in the sense of a regional demographic pattern, it seems that I’ve turned out quite differently. As a secular humanist, I shun religion. As a European-style social democrat, I embrace the prevailing pejoratives; like FDR, I welcome their hatred. Foreign films, espresso, stinky cheese, better beer and novels with words, not pictures, continue to intrigue me.

My idealized version of Americana is small, unique and localized, and it comes without Wal-Mart, Chick-fil-A or Amazon. Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and those who’d consider them their champions indeed reside somewhere on the other side of a fundamental divide, either of my own making or theirs. They pluck, pander, pave and profiteer. I just want a community based on knowledge, not knee-jerks.

Most of the 52-year-old white males that I know feel very differently than I do, especially the ones with whom I grew up in that sort of rural Jimmy Stewart, small-town, countryside setting that always prompts nostalgic elegies of bygone days.

But among the chief characteristics of this presumably golden, unspoiled upbringing, which my fellow survivors regularly enjoy forgetting, are these: It was superstitious, stiflingly mono-cultural, permeated by casual (at best) racism, and with malignant varieties of overt cultural prejudice always present for absorption by youth, as openly displayed by the adult community’s supposed role models, movers and shakers.

It sickened me then, as now, and this is why whenever I hear fellow white males of my approximate generation spluttering and pontificating on the topic of Muslim Obama this and unpatriotic Obummer that, all the while denying that their “ideas” emanate from racism, I look at them and say just one word.

Really?

---

C’mon, guys. I grew up with you, played sports with you, drank beer and chased girls and cheated on tests with you. In reality, the halcyonic places where we grew up were unceasingly stupid, racist places, even if the racism wasn’t overt – hell, it didn’t even have to be; why do you think it was 98% white there in the first place?

You enjoy denying that any of the oozing, pestilential, stultifying hatred you unthinkingly spew when challenged has anything to do with racism, or by extension, with the absence of any semblance of diversity or choice in our respective upbringings, and while I’ll concede that the contagion is buried so deeply that it probably is genuinely subconscious at this juncture, it does not permit you to dismiss it.

Don’t kid a kidder, fellows, and stop embarrassing me. I gotta live here, you know. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a vote for Barack Obama to cast. I hope you choke on it.

ON THE AVENUES: Back alley white male power abortions.

ON THE AVENUES: Back alley white male power abortions.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

It's rather difficult to properly denigrate Richard Mourdock's ridiculous conception-via-rape comments when his congregation thinks he was directly quoting a Commandment, which is to say, one more time with feeling: GOP stalwarts like Mourdock don’t have a platform problem. Rather, they have a supporter problem.

And so the usual talking point screaming lines are drawn, and I am struck, though not surprised, that as “traditional” white bread America inexorably diminishes in demographic terms, marginalizing the rural areas that are its last bastions, the need for its cohorts to define themselves according to increasingly narrow ideological parameters and to aggressively inflict these cultural boundary markers on the rest of us becomes ever more pronounced – and expressed through a dialect of sheer intolerance that seems to date from antebellum times.

Thus, when it comes to my own support for enlightened self-determination in the area of reproductive choice, it isn’t any longer the case that I’m merely a dastardly secular humanist, or a garden-variety, wicked atheist, or even a dreaded Obama-ite. These days, I’m also certifiably, indisputably un-American.

Unfortunately for them, this is badge of honor territory for me.

It’s also the perfect example of the tactics of fanatics unable to successfully foist their personalized God on a nation presumably founded (albeit seldom consistently administered) according to religious diversity in a secular framework. Instead, they seek to exalt the secular American framework alongside their own specific religious worldview, fuse them into a theocratic duality, and ceremoniously drum those like me straight out of it, too.

I used to advocate that they take their zillionaires’ financial backing and use it to buy me out. Hell, it’d be a good deal for them; for the money required to buy an evening’s worth of GOP-cum-Nurnberg television ads, they could have the Confidentials flying to exile amid Europe’s civilized glories.

However, lately I’m finding merit in the pleasurable idea of waiting them out, because the irony of the white fundamentalist’s lament is that apart from Mormonism, there are too few of them, birthing far too seldom, to reverse demography’s future verdict. It couldn’t be that Republican women have abortions, too?

Back in July of 2009, one of my newspaper columns was taken up by Romanian film reviews: “The Way I Spent the End of the World,” “12:08 East of Bucharest,” “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days,” the latter a gritty, harrowing and compelling account of a Romanian university student’s illegal abortion in 1987. This is what I had to say about it.

---

Romania became Communist shortly after the conclusion of World War II, and during these years of postwar economic and political dislocation, reliable contraceptives generally were unobtainable. However, owing perhaps to the custom followed by Romania’s overlord, the USSR, abortions were readily available and absurdly cheap, and it is suggested that there were four abortions for every live birth by 1966.

Around this time (Nicolae) Ceausescu, who dubbed himself the "Genius of the Carpathians" in spite (or perhaps because) of his background as a semi-literate, peasant cobbler, came to power and commenced grafting the personality cult of North Korea’s Kim Il Sung onto the pathetically grandiose public theatrics of Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy, creating a stunted and strangulated fiefdom in one of the continent’s least equipped socio-economic milieus. The result was a tragic quarter century.

In 1967, concluding that his impoverished country needed more citizens, Ceausescu decreed abortion illegal overnight, bringing the full powers of Romania’s police state to bear in enforcing the ban. The immediate effect of the decree was an abrupt doubling of the birth rate. This bulge was followed by a fast and steady decline in births, and by 1987, the country’s population had ceased to grow at all, but Ceausescu had already moved on to other, equally catastrophic projects, including the systematic bulldozing of countryside villages and the transfer of their inhabitants to virtual enslavement within “agro-industrial” complexes.

Significantly, one Romanian population statistic steadily increased during the years following the abortion ban: The maternal mortality rate tripled. Demographers have since learned that in terms of statistics, the deaths of women succumbing to botched illegal abortions in Romania were included with those of women dying during childbirth.

At the time documented by “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days,” all parties involved in transacting an illegal abortion faced lengthy jail terms if caught. In addition to the threat of maiming and even death, and in the continuing enforced absence of legal contraceptives (a ubiquitous black market notwithstanding), a Romanian woman who sought to terminate a pregnancy could be arrested, convicted, imprisoned and her career left in ruins.

Taking all these dire factors into consideration, the film serves as a chilling case study of what happens when a government bureaucracy denies women control over their bodies, their destinies and their very lives. In Romania, the interference stemmed from a psychotic dictator’s whim, and his motivations were purely secular. Far more often in places like America, they are religious in nature.

Reproductive decision-making in many locales tends to reflect the patriarchal concerns of men rather than those of women, even as females remain responsible for bearing the children. It is a regrettable state of affairs that cuts across religious and secular concerns.

Oddly, when I heard the news of Dr. George Tiller’s (2009) murder by a terrorist during a church service in Wichita, it made me think of gray, desperate, soot-stained blocks of flats in Bucharest, along with legalities, illegalities, ideologies and the universality of human suffering.

Design, condescension and movable furniture.

Last week, as it pertains to the design of New Albany's Bicentennial Park by stealth, NAC's Jeff Gillenwater asked Pete Andriot of Rundell Ernstberger Associates a simple, reasonable question:

"When did the public input process into this park's location, imagined functions, design, and construction occur?"

We continue to impatiently tap our feet awaiting Andriot's reply, if any, and Jeff will be posting again on this topic on Tuesday, but in the meantime, I'd like to return to a comment of Andriot's that grates more jarringly with each passing day.

"New Albany isn’t ready for movable tables and chairs yet."

My response:

In the absence of substantive input from New Albany's citizenry, exactly how do you know this?

Did Bob Caesar and Shelle England assure you that the simple, guileless folks in New Albany cannot ever grasp such concepts, or absent any apparent desire to query the general populace, did you even go so far as to ask the tiny non-representative membership of the bicentennial committee itself?

Or, rather, did you glance at the history of the park site and conclude that any city so ineptly willing to decimate a historic post office building and permit the devastated footprint to go perpetually to seed over a period of almost 50 years afterward does not deserve to be considered capable of grasping movable furniture?

At this point, I thought it wise to search "movable furniture," and the very first hit reveals a factoid with which Andriot and his firm might readily (and unfortunately) agree: New York City is the sort of place where they're actually ready for movable furniture (see below).

There, but not here ... okay, so why?

Are we that much dumber, and New Yorkers that much smarter, that we can't even be asked by the designer?

Ahh, but maybe it isn't because ordinary New Albanians don't get it.

Maybe it's because the cadre of top-downers, those same suspects, self-appointed to spoon feed us their conventional white bread wisdom without sharing what passes for reasoning, don't understand movable furniture themselves, and the designer has wisely chosen not to offend his somewhat paymasters (a frightened, hands-off city council ensures they operate sans accountability) by instead casually offending those of us in the general populace: after all, if the powers that be were not going to solicit public input for a $750K project, why the hell would the landscape architect care to do so, either?

I suppose that in this sense, the Bicentennial already has become wonderfully and delightfully New Albany, which is to say, the same tired, congenital, wearisome song and dance.

The Battery Conservancy Americas Design Competition 2012 Invites You to Draw Up Chair

The Battery Conservancy invites students and professionals from the Americas (Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean), to design an iconic moveable outdoor seating element. The winning design will be fabricated for use at The Battery, the 25-acre park at the tip of Manhattan which annually welcomes six million visitors.

Why a Moveable Chair?
As the great urban theorist William Holly Whyte discovered: “Chairs enlarge choice: to move into the sun, out of it, to make room for groups, move away from them. If you know you can move if you want to, you feel more comfortable staying put.” The Battery’s movable chairs will delight while they invite, animating the park and making it Downtown’s central meeting place.