New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
Granted, Luxembourg is a small country, roughly 1,000 square miles (20% smaller than Rhode Island) with 600,000 inhabitants. Outside of Luxembourg City it's mostly rural, hilly and forested; the Battle of the Bulge occurred here in part.
Luxembourg just became the first country in the world to make its entire public transit system free to all.
As of today (March 1), all trams, trains, and buses will cost not a single euro to ride anywhere in the small nation, a steep discount compared to the 440 euros ($485) price tag for an annual pass until now.
Although Luxembourg, home to fewer than a million people, is the first country to institute such a policy, it’s not a new idea. Some 97 cities around the world have introduced free public transit, according to the authors of Free Public Transit: And Why We Don’t Pay to Ride Elevators (Black Rose Books, 2019)
Wait -- what's that book again? This might be the next book JT and I read together.
Just like we don't pay to use elevators, this book argues that we shouldn't pay to ride public transit. In an age of increasing inequalities and ecological crisis, movements advocating free public transit push us to rethink the status quo and consider urban transit as a fundamental human right. Editors Jason Prince and Judith Dellheim have collected a panorama of case studies from around the world: the United States, Canada, Estonia, Greece, France, Italy, Sweden, Poland, China, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and more. These movements are spread across the world, and they aim to achieve two main outcomes—ecological good and fair wealth distribution. Free public transit—coupled with increased capacity and improving service of public transit—might well be the only viable strategy to eliminating car usage and achieving greenhouse gas targets in industrialized cities within a reasonable time frame. Movements for free mass transit also aim to see public transit treated as a public good, like water and garbage service, that should be paid for out of general tax revenues or a fairer regional tax strategy. This book covers the rapidly changing transport options in cities today, including bike and car share options, Uber and Lyft, and the imminent arrival of driver-less vehicles. The first English-language book ever written on the subject, Free Public Transit is a ground breaking book for those concerned about the future of our cities and an essential resource for those who make, or try to change, urban planning and transport policies.
It seems that Ljubljana, Slovenia is a hot spot for craft beer, which also is the case in Tallinn (Estonia), where we visited in 2016.
As recounted earlier, I was much enamored of the local Union Pivo ("beer") when gliding through Ljubljana in 1987, this being the golden lager from a brewery founded in the 1800s, and not to be confused with Pints&union in New Albany.
Tellingly, today's Union brewery (owned by Heineken and merged with Laško, another Slovene brewery) has installed a restaurant and pub inside the old malt house, where a small brewing system produces new styles for on-premise drinking. I definitely want to go there.
As for the myriad beer options of the craft variety, this guide looks quite promising. We have three days, which is time enough to skim the surface.
If you were to hear the phrase “Slovenia’s biggest lie”, you might think that it would have something to do with our tendency to exaggerate our heroic history or to downplay the small size of our country. But that’s not the case. Slovenia’s biggest lie is, in fact, about drinking, and its one I’ve heard my entire life: “Let’s have one beer.”
It should come as no surprise that my fellow citizens have embraced the so-called craft beer revolution like so many others around the world. And, like in many other countries, it began slowly in our capital and spread throughout Slovenia resulting in the unprecedented growth of craft breweries, gypsy breweries and craft beer bars. It got insane – so insane that no sane person ten years ago would have been able to imagine how many different beers are now available. Even people who work in the beer industry aren’t able to provide an exact number of breweries in Slovenia, let alone the number of different beers being produced across the country.
So, to help you get your bearings in Slovenia’s capital, here’s a guide to the best Ljubljana beer bars, breweries, and bottle shops by a born and raised local who appreciates a refreshing pint.
The pace of change in the world tends to be rapid and the turbulence universal, at times convulsive. Consider the case of Slovenia, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until the post-WW1 settlement that placed Slovenia inside the newly created Yugoslav kingdom.
In fact, to this very day Austria seems a much better template for the Slovene national character than participation in the union of the South Slavs. Slovenia feels decidedly Central European, not Balkan, and I get the impression that from the inception of the post-WWII socialist Yugoslav construction, the Slovenes were looking for a loophole.
They found it in 1991, joining Croatia in departing the federation and suffering only a brief ten-day war, outmaneuvering the disintegrating Yugoslav army and avoiding the bloodshed further south. By 2008, Slovenia was in the European Union taking its first turn at the six-month EU presidency. Now the country is better compared to Estonia than North Macedonia.
These and other stories of Slovenia's recent history are told at the National Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, located at Cekin Mansion by Tivoli Park, a short walk from the old town.
On Wednesday after our castle visit we had a riverside snack alongside folks who aren't deterred by cool, rainy weather ...
... then took a short walk and hopped a bus to the museum.
I enjoyed every minute of the museum.
The National Museum of Contemporary History is a state museum dedicated to the heritage of recent Slovenian history, from the beginning of the 20th century onwards. It holds collections relating to the First and Second World Wars, the period between the two wars, the Socialist period, and the establishment of independent Slovenia. Exhibits include museum objects, archive and library materials, fine art works, and photographs.
One can easily imagine this approach leading to violence here in America.
On the desk of a government building, a diorama is laid out. Little vehicles sit by the side of a road, watched over by little policemen. On two recent mornings, this scene was recreated in real life. Drivers caught speeding along the road between Tallinn and the town of Rapla were stopped and given a choice. They could pay a fine, as normal, or take a “timeout” instead, waiting for 45 minutes or an hour, depending on how fast they were going when stopped.
Public reaction in Estonia has been positive.
Estonians have praised the idea for being more egalitarian — monetary fines are not adjusted according to income, as in neighbouring Finland, but everyone has the same number of hours in the day — and because they perceive the punishment as being directly related to the offence, rather than an excuse to fill state coffers.
An old one but a good one, generally credited to Dan Hagen.
“See, the American people have to realize that universal health care is just a dream. It's too expensive. It's too impractical. It's impossible. No other country in the world has been able to establish it, except for Canada, Uruguay, Brunei, Hong Kong, India, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and pretty much the entire civilized modern world.”
I dunno. We might be forced to reduce the profit margins of the 1%.
DO YOU KNOW what really annoys me about the media’s coverage of U.S. politics, and especially the Democratic Party?
Google the words “moderate” or “centrist” and a small group of names will instantly appear: Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden, and, yes, Howard Schultz.
Bloomberg is considered a “centrist thought leader” (Vanity Fair). Klobuchar is the “straight-shooting pragmatist” (Time). Biden is the “quintessential centrist” (CNN) and the “last hurrah for moderate Democrats” (New York magazine). Shultz is gifted with high-profile interview slots to make his “centrist independent” pitch to voters.
Now Google the freshman House Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s been dubbed a member of the “loony left” (Washington Post), a “progressive firebrand” (Reuters), and a “liberal bomb thrower” (New York Times).
Got that? Biden, Schultz and Co., we are told, sit firmly in the middle of American politics; Ocasio-Cortez stands far out on its fringes.
This is a brazen distortion of reality, a shameless and demonstrable lie that is repeated day after day in newspaper op-eds and cable news headlines.
“It’s easy to call what AOC is doing as far-lefty, but nothing could be farther from the truth,” Nick Hanauer, the venture capitalist and progressive activist, told MSNBC in January. “When you advocate for economic policies that benefit the broad majority of citizens, that’s true centrism. What Howard Schultz represents, the centrism that he represents, is really just trickle-down economics.”
“He is not the centrist,” continued Hanauer. “AOC is the centrist.”
Hanauer is right. And Bernie Sanders is centrist too — smeared as an “ideologue” (The Economist) and “dangerously far left” (Chicago Tribune). So too is Elizabeth Warren — dismissed as a “radical extremist” (Las Vegas Review-Journal) and a “class warrior” (Fox News).
The inconvenient truth that our lazy media elites do so much to ignore is that Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Warren are much closer in their views to the vast majority of ordinary Americans than the Bloombergs or the Bidens. They are the true centrists, the real moderates; they represent the actual political middle ...
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference
-- Robert Frost
The photo was taken on the Charles Bridge in Prague one afternoon in June of 1989, and of course at the time Czechoslovakia was "behind" the Iron Curtain (from our vantage point, at least), and nowhere close to the level of accessibility the city experiences today.
It's been too long since I've been to Prague, but based on the photos I see today and the testimony of recent visitors, you'd be compelled to visit the bridge by the light of the moon just before dawn to find it as emptied of people as in this photo. Most of the people pictured here were natives, walking back and forth, to and from places important to them in their own lives.
Overtourism is a thing. Maybe it always was, but we seem to have missed it for the most part these past few years. Our destinations have included Tallinn, Estonia; Mechelen and Poperinge, Belgium; Catania (Sicily) and Valletta (Malta); Porto, Portugal and Gdansk, Poland. There have been tourists in these places, though not a ridiculous selfie-ridden scrum, and part of the reason for this might be our habit of off-season travel in addition to choosing secondary locales.
To me, they're just as exciting as the places you're "supposed" to go.
Haarlem, Netherlands is only a few minutes from Amsterdam. To be in Haarlem, which is a large city in its own right, is to enjoy everything wonderful about the Dutch way of life without stumbling over tourists in the fashion of Amsterdam. Yes, there are museums and sights in Amsterdam that cannot be found in Haarlem, but thanks to an amazing public transportation system, they're all within easy reach from outside the larger city.
My next trip to Europe will be my 40th since 1985, so I can't say I'm not a tourist like all the rest. Just the same, the smaller cities and "lesser" attractions have come to captivate me. My advice is to vacate the beaten path and find the place that speaks to you like all the others can't.
Amsterdam, Venice, Barcelona, Paris — the poster children for overtourism are well-known. Now, 20 more cities are on alert lest they turn into the future face of the problem, according to a new report from the World Travel & Tourism Council and commercial real estate firm JLL.
The report, called “Destination 2030,” examines the tourism “readiness” of 50 destinations around the world and groups cities into five types. The “emerging performers” category includes destinations where infrastructure and tourism momentum are growing along with the pressures associated with more tourists. Those cities were Bangkok; Cape Town, South Africa; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Istanbul; Jakarta, Indonesia; Mexico City; and New Delhi.
Another 13 cities — called “mature performers” — were described as having an established tourism infrastructure, strong leisure or business travel, and good positioning to manage current growth levels. “But there is a risk of future strains related to visit volume, infrastructure or activity that is testing readiness for additional growth,” the report said. It listed Auckland, New Zealand; Berlin; Dublin; Las Vegas; Lisbon; London; Los Angeles; Madrid; Miami; New York; Seoul; Seville, Spain; and Sydney in this category.
The study adds a fresh layer to the ongoing conversation over how much tourism is too much, and how both iconic and emerging destinations can cope with the world’s apparently insatiable appetite for travel.
“Over the past few years … several destinations, and cities in particular, have been criticized in the media for the under-management of travel and tourism and the stresses that visitor numbers have put on urban systems and residents,” the report said.
Estonia is mentioned fairly often in these pages. Our trip there in 2016 was a profound experience, and there'll be a return visit some day. We found Tallinn's trams and buses exemplary. Next time, I hope we make it into the countryside. As tourists, we'll be paying to ride, but the advantages of Estonians having free transit options are clear, and discussed herein.
In myriad ways, America subsidizes cars. It doesn't have to be this way.
The buses are on time, the trams are shiny and new, and passengers usually get a seat. In many cities that would be remarkable enough. But in Tallinn locals are also not required to buy a ticket. In 2013 it became the world’s first capital city to offer residents free public transport. Estonia as a whole has been following suit, and last year set the ambition of becoming the first country with free public transport nationwide. Buses are now free of charge in 11 of its 15 counties.
If the objective is curtailing ultimately unsustainable car-centrism, then a few eggs are required to be broken.
Free public transport on its own is not enough to stop people driving, though the evidence is that it helps. In Tallinn higher parking fees and reduced space for cars also played a part in cutting city-centre traffic: on-street parking now costs €6 an hour, and some parking spaces and car lanes have been replaced by bus lanes. Officials say providing a free alternative allowed them to avoid a backlash when driving in the capital was made more expensive and less convenient.
… old, and this song from 1970 perfectly encapsulates my mood in the down-buzz aftermath of last Tuesday’s primary election.
You’d be forgiven for assuming that keyboardist Robert Lamm wrote it. He was the band’s most prolific composer during the early years, and served as mouthpiece for a decidedly left-wing political conscience that faded later as the hits came fast and furious.
Actually “Where Do We Go From Here?” was the first song ever penned by bassist Peter Cetera, later to become a middle-of-the-road love-song-emoting pop star. The horns are absent. In it, Cetera surveys the socio-political landscape in America at the time and emerges hopeful, if puzzled.
That’s understandable. The Summer of Love had passed through Woodstock in route to a big crash at Altamont; now Richard Nixon was on top, the crew-cut adults were keen to crack the whip on a counter-culture that itself was becoming ever more disillusioned. Moreover, Vietnam remained an 800-lb gorilla.
Here’s the pivot: Where do we go here in Nawbany, circa 2019?
Deaf Gahan’s hefty wallet was enough to defeat David White, and the incumbent is the DemoDisneyDixiecratic nominee for mayor despite hemorrhaging 15% of his 2015 primary vote total, something other analysts seem determined to ignore.
Wait -- we have other analysts apart from NA Confidential?
According the usual suspects it was a quasi-Biblical outcome, with Hitching Post fried chicken and loaded Rice Krispies Treats standing in for fish fingers and loaves. The Kool-Aid flowed like wine, or at least it cascaded in the fashion of storm water obeying the laws of gravity from the heavenly heights of the Summit Springs chain-think strip mine.
One Gahan functionary, evidently disturbed by the imminent prospect of a job loss, happily took to Facebook to celebrate, crediting God herself for preserving pay-to-play patronage in our fair town.
It would have been the ideal occasion for a gospel choir "come-to-Duggins" moment, except that during Gahan’s 16-year career of mind-numbing mediocrity he’s done almost nothing to empower minority rights and advancement in this city.
“He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”?
Perhaps, but for now Deaf is most fond of “Disneyland Uber Alles.”
---
Naturally it was disconcerting to watch as the misgoverning clique, their elite party hacks and various other engorged sycophants merrily pelted the opposition with Jorge Lanz’s ceaseless C-notes while thumbing their noses at the Election Board’s dignified request to behave at the polling places, prior to doubling down on the Bud Light Mang-O-Ritas.
However, as previously noted, the electoral math emerging from May 7 is looking quite solid for Republican challenger Mark Seabrook.
Most importantly, Gahan's intrinsic crookedness no longer can be doubted. He’s a con man, a bully and an addict, dependent on the campaign finance revenue stream from out-of-town contract seekers, and thus compelled to keep the Ponzi scheme alive with projects funded by cash infusions from wherever he can pocket them.
Soon Team Gahan will be “borrowing” money from eatery tip jars. Whatever. Your grandchildren can deal with it.
Precipice, meet Wile E. Gahan. Few of White's supporters will vote for Hizzoner. Some of them may sit out the general election, but most will opt for Seabrook. Combine the corrosive trends of two-term attrition with those 300 votes Gahan lost Tuesday, and Dear Leader’s autumn ceiling is looking like 3,000 votes at most -- and this doesn’t factor the chunk subtracted from the Democrats by Dan Coffey's probable independent candidacy.
(May 15 update: for a consideration of Coffey's potential impact as an independent candidate, go here and here)
Seabrook can win in November, and he might win convincingly. To be sure, Gahan will have $175,000 of pay-to-play money available for saturation sliming, and he'll be willing to spend every last cent of it to keep the gravy train rolling. All the same I believe a derailment is coming, so it’s straight to hell (or the Cayman Islands) for our malignant narcissist-in-chief.
Anchor Elvis soon will be leaving the building, because I have a feeling God will be siting out the general election.
---
My post-primary thoughts have been sober and reflective, as with Eric “Otter” Stratton’s prescient 1978 pronouncement.
I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part.
Customarily this task falls to me, and yet I’m also mindful of Groucho Marx’s famous injunction.
"I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."
Short of Falling Run being renamed “The Rubicon,” there’s a camel somewhere in a full-body cast. This time the post-election housekeeping feels different to me, even transformational. Resolutions aplenty are in the offing, one in particular.
Granted, I’m always venting about an impending exit from the resistance treadmill, only to drag myself back into the maelstrom when the second-raters annoy me. Now something seems to have changed. If I can’t entirely disengage, how exactly to reformat the nature of engagement?
I’ve been asking myself lots of questions like this, leading to one central query: I’ll be 60 years of age in August of 2020, and accordingly, what can I see myself doing these next few years?
The top answer to emerge from this dialogue is what I cannot visualize myself doing, and that’s serving as 3rd district council person.
Consequently, Greg Phipps will be delighted to learn that he’s safe. I’m not seeking public office this year. What the future holds is anyone’s guess; after all, never say never. However, I’m saying “highly unlikely” -- and for the following reasons.
First and foremost, I’ve said all along that my candidacy was exploratory and depended on the well being of family and household. We’re doing fine, thank you, but we’re coming very quickly to a time of numerous decisions that will impact our future. Simply stated, the inhabitants of the 1117 East Spring Street Neighborhood Association, human and feline, come first.
I’d make a damned effective council person, and even if Phipps won this fall, I’d make him work far harder than he has before for the right to continue as a obedient rubber stamp for a soulless, agoraphobic mayor. In so many ways, one passive and the other manipulative, they’re perfectly matched politically. The real fun comes in imagining Phipps’ council performance to come, when outnumbered by Republicans, without the mayoral safety net.
I imagine he’d resign rather than face the challenge.
In addition, working with David White for the past 18 months has gifted me with valuable lessons. Love him or hate him, David’s conception of public service (his “people first” really wasn’t a slogan) and his commitment to the ideal of this service are admirable qualities, and as such I believe the Democrats sacrificed an opportunity last week when he lost.
Contrasting David’s service-oriented outlook with my own office-holding inclinations led to intense introspection. Is public service really what I want to do? Is this my preferred place in the cosmos?
Honestly, no. It isn’t. The sweetest spot of all for me in terms of dedication and intensity is the daily practice of writing, and in the art of the polemic in particular. It’s what makes me tick, and how I can best contribute.
Especially now, with the News and Tribune coming off its most vacantly inept performance in recent memory while pretending to “cover” a New Albany municipal election, NA Confidential has taken on greater importance as an alternative source of information.
The News and Tribune has proven definitively that it won’t be part of any conceivable solution, at least in Floyd County. This newspaper is dead to me, and I propose to treat it accordingly from this point forward.
It’s not pinin'! It’s passed on! This newspaper is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the floor it’d be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now 'istory! It’s off the twig! It’s kicked the bucket, shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-NEWSPAPER!!
Finally, there’s the matter of my ongoing involvement with Pints&union, where Joe has been remarkably indulgent and supportive as I’ve followed my local political obsessions to their logical conclusion. We have a deal and I intend to honor my part of it by doing my utmost to help make Pints&union the success it deserves to be.
Coincidentally the demise of Bank Street Brewhouse has contributed mightily to my current frame of mind, as did attending the funeral of my friend Rick Lang last week. These whiffs of mortality conjure considerations of legacies, and they also prompt an assessment: How much is left in the tank? How many minutes are on the game clock? How best to direct my energies?
Where do I go from here?
To repeat: Home and Hearth ... Pints&union ... NA Confidential.
I’ll keep writing, agitating, clarifying and informing. I’ll keep these writing and publishing options open. I’ll continue to help as best I can as reporter, satirist and polemicist. I’ll follow my muse, and there's no backing away from the resistance, albeit not into another campaign for office.
But find me a way to live in Belgium, Estonia, Sicily or Western Massachusetts, and every single word I’ve written today goes right out the window.
May 3: horse-race-rehash-sadly.html">ON THE AVENUES HORSE RACE REHASH: Sadly, the Kentucky Derby no longer is decadent and depraved. It’s just another vacuous capitalist bait ‘n’ switch.
This essay is reprinted or linked yearly, attesting to my eagerness to remind you that on May Day, while the Louisville area eschews productive labor and focuses its partying proclivities on the ponies, most of the rest of the world takes a holiday amid thoughts about the nature of work itself.
Three years have passed, and still 2016 remains a tough act to follow. It may have been the finest season ever for personal May Day celebrations.
For one thing, Bernie Sanders was running for president that year. As an independent senator and avowed socialist, the fact that Sanders even exists in the American political non-spectrum is as good an introduction as any to the "real" international workers' holiday.
As an added bonus, we weren't in America at all when May 1, 2016 rolled around. Rather, it was the occasion of our Spring Break in Estonia, and two big surprises during a day trip to Helsinki: Kim Andersen's presence and a delightful though short left-wing May Day parade.
Now that Pints&union exists, and we put our first May Day to bed today, perhaps the tradition of May Day parades can be restored to eternally somnolent New Albany in 2020. One time around a city block would suffice to start. I'm sure Develop New Albany stands ready to get on board with this idea, just as long as they can promote tacos.
By the summer of 1987, when I first visited the geopolitical conglomeration formerly known as the Soviet Union, the country’s annual May Day parade in Moscow had long since ceased to be a showcase of international socialism.
Rather, it had reverted to the overt, and was staged as an ideological pageant of nationalistic fervor – a genuine, old-fashioned, patriotic flag-waver for Mother Russia.
For the bedrock Soviet worker, who according to prevailing mythology was the chief beneficiary of international socialism, May Day’s single biggest selling point was being able to avoid the drudgery of the factory for a few precious hours. He’d have rather been on the beach at a posh Black Sea resort in Bulgaria, but what could be done?
At least for a while he could forget about the dystopian Five Year Plan by hopping the subway from his cookie-cutter, high-rise suburb to the historic center of the city, queuing with fellow vodka-bearers, plodding behind the massive missiles through cobblestoned Red Square, and then finally passing the reviewing stand arranged atop Lenin’s Mausoleum for a fleeting glimpse of the jowly old men in furry caps, grimacing arthritically as they waved vacantly into space.
The parade was a choreographed set piece, of course, one fraught with symbolic properties, both for natives seeking clues to the direction of their country apart from the stultifying daily propaganda, and for observers elsewhere, like professional Kremlinologists in the employ of Western intelligence agencies.
These consulting spooks subsequently would examine film of the May Day parade, reshuffle their tea leaves, and strain them through a few hoary apocryphal algorithms. Passwords would be repeated, reports submitted, meetings held, and murmured decisions reached.
In appropriately clandestine fashion, money would be exchanged, and a hush briefly might descend, until suddenly, somewhere in the world, a legally elected government was overthrown – first one of the Capitalist paymasters’ choosing, then another selected by the Communists, each in its own turn, serving the dual purpose of preserving the status quo, and stimulating both full erections and full employment among participating secret agents.
---
Long before the decade of the 1980’s, the workers of the world – be they in Akron, Cape Town or Tashkent – already understood that they neither had become united, nor shed their chains in any fashion sufficient to exercise control over the means of production.
The stewards of the world’s two great economic “-isms” had divided the planet into manageable spheres of influence, with the non-aligned throngs always ripe for recruitment and exploitation. At the end of a day’s toil, the best way for just plain folks to endure the enforced pieties of a May Day parade -- or a 4th of July picnic -- was to remain under the influence.
As Ernest Hemingway reminds us, the bottle is a blessed means of sovereign action. You first drink from it, and then throw it in the direction of the oppressor. In cases of rotgut, you can drink some of it, and then set the remainder aflame just prior to tossing (see “cocktails, Molotov”).
During the Cold War, Russians and Poles chose vodka. Cubans opted for rum. I always imagined the Czechs and Hungarians to be more fortunate than most, seeing as they possessed beer (Pilsner Urquell) and wine (Egri Bikaver) of a higher uniform quality than produced by Warsaw Pact neighbors.
For Americans, there’d be gallons of insipid ice cold light lager and a few pints of Jack Daniels. Choices from our NATO allies might have ranged from English cask bitter to ouzo in Greece, and from schnapps (Germany) to cider (Spain).
It goes to show that as opiates go, booze is vastly preferable to religion.
---
To recap, May Day takes place on May 1, and generally refers to springtime public holidays in the northern hemisphere, where the cultural tradition began long before Marx, Engels and Gus Hall.
For more than 125 years, May Day also has been considered International Workers' Day, which we Americans eventually chucked to another time on the calendar (Labor Day, at summer’s end) so as to avoid confusion with the Commies. Why? Labor and left-wing political movements first established May 1 as International Workers’ Day in memory of those who were killed and wounded during the Haymarket Massacre in 1886, which took place in Chicago.
In all my trips to Europe, only once did I find myself in position to physically attend a May Day parade. It was in Vienna, in 1987. I got up early and walked into the city center from my hostel across from Westbahnhof, finding a comfortable place to stand along the Ringstrasse near City Hall.
The various unions, workplaces and numbered districts each were represented, and at the end, after the sanctioned social elements had marched past, there were series of menacing, piggybacking trailers: Anarchists, Maoists, random radicals and even a mob of hooded Muslim extremists.
Ah yes, I remember it well. Afterwards, I splurged on schnitzel and local draft beer, reflecting on the way that America’s customarily oblivious exceptionalism has detached its labor holiday from the rest of the world’s.
Since our trip I've been following Estonian World on Facebook, finding something fascinating on an almost weekly basis. This story about Lennart Meri offers lots of chewable thought morsels.
... “When he became foreign minister, the most important thing he did, which was something that other countries didn’t do, was get rid of all the commies,” Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who himself was foreign minister when Lennart Meri was president, explains. “Because the so-called ESSR (the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic – editor), the ministry of foreign affairs was just a KGB outfit. That was a policy later followed by other Estonian ministries. Not all of them, but the ones who were successful, (cleaned) house.”
I found myself thinking about the transition soon to come here in New Albany. One of the first things mayoral candidate David White did when announcing his campaign was to assure rank and file city employees that they needn't fear losing their jobs -- but ranking Gahanite appointees and a department heads might be wise to peruse the want ads at our captive "local" newspaper.
That's as it should be. As Meri did with the Estonian foreign ministry, those currently helping Gahan to administer his system of pay-to-play political patronage need to be swept clean. What's more, we all know a Mayor Seabrook or Mayor Coffey would do exactly the same. I can think of one, maybe two potential exceptions, but starting from scratch remains the optimum result.
There is no more reason to defend the current occupants of the third floor in New Albany than Meri had to condone former Communist seat holders. To cite just one example, the flood control department's workers already know how to do the job. The point of a clean sweep is to de-politicize the $60k-yearly job of managing the department.
There are plenty of talented people in this community, and many of them have spent the past eight years stifled by Gahan's control-first insularity. Give them an opportunity to step forward and participate -- and listen to them, this being something White is particularly adept at doing -- then get out of the way and watch the results.
I recommend a vote for White in the Democratic Party primary. We can take back this thing, and put New Albany's people first, as opposed to an engineering company from Indianapolis.
In a moment we'll learn why America’s new apartment buildings all look the same.
First, an aside.
One of our most indelible travel experiences in recent years came in 2016 when we visited Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Only 30 years ago Estonia was a bedraggled Soviet republic, and once freed to pursue its own post-communist destiny the country has caught up to the times by thinking and acting ahead of the curve.
Today Estonia is a juxtaposition of history and modernity, no more so than in Tallinn, where citizens ride public transportation for free and vote on-line, and also can enjoy dinner atop a glass & steel skyscraper then walk a few blocks to the 14th-century old town for a nightcap.
We spent much of our time in the historic city center, marveling at structures still hale and hearty at age 700, then arrived back home to find construction underway atop the concrete foundations at the Breakwater amid mounds of pre-fab stick/toothpick/matchstick framing.
I'd known for a very long time that construction techniques in America differ from those glimpsed in Europe, fundamentally in the dichotomy of wood versus concrete, masonry and steel. In Tallinn there are numerous example of Soviet-built prefab apartment blocks, but instead of wooden "sticks," the standardized sections were made of concrete.
This time the visual evidence was right down the street from our house, deployed for a project obviously intended to last only a few decades -- or around the time the city's TIF subsidy bonds finally get paid off.
All the while I just kept thinking about those venerable buildings in Tallinn. I've heard good things about the living experience in Breakwater, and here in Anchor City that ship has sailed.
It is as it was intended. Must it be this way? I don't know.
Cheap stick framing has led to a proliferation of blocky, forgettable mid-rises—and more than a few construction fires.
These buildings are in almost every U.S. city. They range from three to seven stories tall and can stretch for blocks. They’re usually full of rental apartments, but they can also house college dorms, condominiums, hotels, or assisted-living facilities. Close to city centers, they tend toward a blocky, often colorful modernism; out in the suburbs, their architecture is more likely to feature peaked roofs and historical motifs. Their outer walls are covered with fiber cement, metal, stucco, or bricks.
They really are everywhere, I discovered on a cross-country drive last fall, and they’re going up fast. In 2017, 187,000 new housing units were completed in buildings of 50 units or more in the U.S., the most since the Census Bureau started keeping track in 1972. By my informal massaging of the data, well over half of those were in blocky mid-rises.
These structures’ proliferation is one of the most dramatic changes to the country’s built environment in decades. Yet when I started asking around about them, they didn’t seem to have a name. I encountered someone calling them “stumpies” in a website comment, but that sadly hasn’t caught on. It was only after a developer described the style to me as five-over-one—five stories of apartments over a ground-floor “podium” of parking and/or retail—that I was able to find some online discussion of the phenomenon.
The number of floors and the presence of a podium varies; the key unifying element, it turns out, is under the skin. They’re almost always made of softwood two-by-fours, or “stick,” in construction parlance, that have been nailed together in frames like those in suburban tract houses.
The method traces to 1830s Chicago, a boomtown with vast forests nearby ...
My first reaction was this: I haven't seen Liege, but at least I had a beer in the city's train station once -- the old one, because now there's a completely new train station (2009).
Then I remembered that our intrepid band of beercyclists had traversed Liege in 2004, approaching from the north along the Meuse, pausing to watch as the Tour de France got underway, then continuing to Durbuy.
Liege is a city that usually doesn’t make the top of a traveler’s bucket list. But Liege taught me to never underestimate an under-the-radar destination. It may not be as big or flashy as more renowned places, but discovering the hidden gems of a city can be a pleasure in itself.
This is so very true. The list of lesser renowned European cities we've visited in recent years includes Mechelen (Belgium), Porto (Portugal), Catania (Sicily), Tallinn (Estonia) and Gdansk (Poland). Each of these places yielded ample and at times incredible treasures sufficient to reward a short stay.
It's understandable for us to covet Paris, Rome and Prague. However, we shouldn't neglect Perpignan, Trieste and Brno.
The first beer I ever drank in Poland was a lager in 1987 at a mysterious joint in Warsaw, located purely by accident, which defied all efforts to find a second time.
It was hot and humid, in the middle of the afternoon. I remember cutting through a neighborhood to get to the hotel, but at some point I heard male voices -- and more importantly, the clink of glasses touching.
It was a pub of some sort. All I could fathom with any degree of certainty was that there was a building shaded by street trees, filled with men dressed mostly in work clothing, though a few wore suits – and they all were throwing back golden-colored draft beers in gorgeous fat mugs.
I was more thirsty than intimidated, and it was clear that Poles liked Americans. Entering the front door, I saw a serving counter and walked straight to it. No English was spoken, but a transaction was negotiated … once, and then a second time. I’d like to report that something novel and revealing came of it.
Nothing did, but at the same time, no one hassled me. I drank my beers in peace just like everyone else, and quickly found the hotel.
Actually I was missing out on more than just this neighborhood watering hole's street address, although this fact wasn't apparent at the time. What I was missing was Grodziskie: "The Polish Smoked Wheat Beer That Nearly Went Extinct."
A 1914 description in ‘Bierbrauerei’ by M. Krandauer, posted by Ron Pattinson, gives a pretty good overall idea of the brewing process and what could be expected in a Grätzer of the time.
“3. Grätzer Bier, a rough, bitter beer, brewed from 100% wheat malt with intense smoke and hop flavor. The green malt undergoes smoking during virtually the whole drying process, is highly dried and has a strong aroma in addition to the smoked flavour. An infusion mash is employed. Hopping rate: for 1 Zentner of malt, 3 kg hops. Gravity just 7o [Balling]. Fermentation is carried out in tuns at a temperature of 15 to 20oC. Since the beer in the tun, as a result of the expulsion of great quantities protein and resin, doesn’t break, it is mixed with isinglass and pumped into barrels. After two or three days it is completely clear and ready to be filled into delivery casks or bottles with the addition of 2 to 5% Krausen.”
(Note: Zentner is equal to 50kg or about 110 pounds)
The mere sight of the words "oak-smoked" conjures a visit from Pavlov's mutt. Back in 2012, the brew team at NABC took a stab at it.
David Pierce, NABC's Director of Brewing Operations clues us into a new NABC small batch brew:
Ben Minton will be brewing another new historical re-creation session beer this week. We recently acquired a small quantity of oak (eiche) smoked wheat malt for this beer. The beer will be 100% wheat, something we've never done here, and it will be a very hard beer to brew. If you see Ben pulling out his hair, this is why.
Here is an overview of the style.
Grätzer/Grodziskie ... Grätzer is actually indigenous to Poland, where it was known as grodziskie. Grätz was the German name for the town Grodzisk, which was, for a little over a hundred years, part of Prussia. But the beer style both pre- and post-dated Prussia, and was in fact still brewed in Poland until the 1990s. Grodzisk was a major center of brewing, and at the end of the 18th Century, boasted 53 brewers.
One of the famous local products in that old-school Beervana was a beer made entirely of smoked wheat malt.
Indigenous Grodziskie consumed on Polish soil remains a bucket list item for me, but it's not the only "legacy" style with connections to Poland. Baltic Porter was the reason for my third visit to Poland in 2002 (I transited the country in 1989 during a train trip from Moscow to East Berlin, but didn't stop over).
I included Krakow on the 2002 group trip itinerary to Eastern Europe so we could tour the Zwiec brewery, source of a fine (and elusive) example of Baltic Porter, which is a nebulous style touching on several brewing traditions.
Sometimes Baltic Porter is an appellation of seaside origin, but not always. In Michael “Beer Hunter” Jackson’s World Guide to Beer, he mentions a “Porter” still being brewed in the 1970s in the town of Martin, Slovakia -- quite far away from the Baltic Sea.
Conversely, the New Albanian Brewing Company’s first batch of Solidarity Baltic Porter was brewed in 2005 within walking distance of water, albeit the Ohio River.
The Beer Judge Certification Program description for Baltic Porter indicates that top-fermented English-style Porters and strong Stouts may well have been the original impetus for dark beers brewed in places like Poland, Estonia and Finland, but German lager brewing techniques supplanted ale-making long ago.
My theory always was that those brewers kept the same basic recipe for Porter but switched to lager yeast and cool fermentation. Alcohol contents crept up, and these days some examples of Baltic Porter seem closer to Doppelbock, while others lean toward Imperial Stouts.
To me they're all delicious, even if a tad different.
This great style is underrated everywhere ... except maybe Poland.
On Polish bottles, next to the alcoholic strength, there is a second number at least as important to local drinkers: the percentage of sugar extract before fermentation, or degrees Plato. Like starting gravity—an awfully nerdy thing to put on a beer label—it’s a measure of wort density. American drinkers might wonder why that would be useful, since the alcoholic strength is right there next to it, and isn’t that the most important thing? But to Polish drinkers, that extract is a measure of richness, an indicator of boldness and body. If you want a big beer, you look for a big extract number; the rich and bitter Pinta Imperator Baltycki, for example, has an extract of 24.7 degrees (that’s a gravity of about 1.104, for you homebrewers).
See? Lush.
The story about beer writer Michael Jackson inventing the category called “Baltic porter” is true, as far as it goes. He wrote that the classification “grew out of a series of articles I wrote in 1990, after a visit to Estonia.”
In my mind at this precise instant, I can imagine trays of smoked eel and pickled herring being paired with either of these polar opposites, Grodziskie or Baltic Porter.
For a late autumn/early winter week in Gdansk, I want them all.
If I seem to be a tad fascinated by the topic of post-WWII communist times in eastern/central Europe, it's because I've never been able to shake the impressions left by traveling there in the late 1980s.
It's a kinky urbanist streak in my character, but here are a handful of links to past posts tangentially related to housing in these places.
This latest amazing revelation includes a useful reminder, in that when these structures first were raised, they were regarded as luxurious examples of modern housing in the context of previous domiciles.
This doesn't excuse Soviet colonial rule or domestic repression. It just helps explain a few things.
The city is looking to the ubiquitous building type from its Communist past to help solve a housing crunch.
Yesterday, Berlin’s Senate announced a project to add more units on top of already existing buildings in the city’s east, with a possible capacity of up to 50,000 new homes. The plan to add floors isn’t novel in itself, of course, even in Berlin. What’s striking is the specific type of building chosen for the experiment: East Berlin’s Plattenbau. These mass produced, partly prefabricated modernist apartment complexes (the name translates as “slab buildings” in reference to the concrete panels that form their walls) were put up in huge numbers during the Communist era. When a German thinks of a Communist-era building, a Plattenbau likely springs to mind.
After reunification, however, Plattenbau were heavily derided as dreary, meretricious, and frequently remodeled, demolished, or reduced in size. Now, it seems these buildings are set for another reversal, rising high again as their role in providing decent housing is reassessed ...
Also, I keep returning to a rant: until the moment when the Regional Development Authority begins talking about mobility solutions that involve modes of transportation like buses and light rail, as opposed to more of the same passenger cars with only the driver inside, then I'm not taking the RDA seriously.
Dunkirk is a shrinking, suburban city on the northern coast of France. It’s a car town, where public buses are a mode of last resort: They represent only five percent of trips.
But when Patrice Vergriete ran for mayor in 2014, he envisioned something different: a sustainable city that allures and serves young people, families, and the elderly alike. So he made a radical campaign promise, which he thinks helped him win: make the buses free.
“I wanted to give back purchasing power to the families,” Vergriete says in an interview at CityLab Paris.
In 2015, Vergriete’s administration launched free weekend service. It was a popular move: Saturday ridership increased by 30 percent, and Sunday ridership by some 80 percent. People loved it, telling local media that they saved money and time by avoiding the stress of parking.
What’s more, passengers diversified. Before, transit in the Dunkirk area had been solely the province of the poor, the elderly, and young students. Now professionals and families—car owners, in other words—began to ride, too. They scarcely considered transit over driving when both modes cost them money, even if bus fare was as cheap €1.40, according to Vergriete. But a totally free option “made people stop and think,” he said.
Now buses in the Dunkirk region will be fully gratis, seven days a week, starting in September 2018. Dunkirk will be the largest city in France to offer such a service (though it won’t be the first).
Some people can’t believe the metro can afford it, Vergriete says. “They think it’s like magic,” he says. “They think it’s not possible, that you are a liar. You cannot pay the salaries of the drivers, for the buses, with free transport.”
But rider fares only ever made up about 10 percent of transit’s operating budget, which is about €50 million per year, he explains. The rest come from a special transport tax levied on businesses and the regional government’s operating general budget. Transit systems all over the world operate on similar budget breakdowns, where “farebox recovery” is quite low. When riders are already paying so little, “I think mayors should think about making it free,” he said. “It’s really a choice that we are making to charge” ...
During the three decades I've traveled in Europe, it has been understood that $8-per-gallon petrol discourages excessive auto use, and that subsidies for public transportation achieve more than one purpose.
"Like roads, mass transit is not self-sustaining: both roads and mass transit require a combination of user fees and other government funding to pay for operations, maintenance, and expansion," The Hamilton Project authors wrote in a May 2015 paper titled, "Racing Ahead or Falling Behind: Six Economic Facts About Transportation Infrastructure in the United States."
Dare we mention quality of life?
Liberating all transit would cost the Paris region an extra €6 billion annually, according to one estimate. But the potential upsides are equally enormous: cleaner air, reduced healthcare costs, plummeting carbon emissions. There’s also the possibility that free-transit-for-all would make Paris so pleasant and easy to live in that it becomes irresistible to investors.
As usual, Estonia explores the periphery of the sensible. If it weren't for the complexity of the language, we'd retire there. Are tutors available?
... On July 1, the entire country of Estonia will create the largest 24/7 free public transit zone in the world, one that will stretch across its entire territory. That will make it feasibly possible (if complicated) to travel by bus from one end of this 1.3 million-strong Baltic nation to the other without paying a cent.
snip
The implications of such a model are vast. Free buses for all could lead to a massive democratization of mobility for Estonians, meaning that travel costs paid at point of use need no longer be factored into many people’s monthly budgeting. And while outsiders might assume the government’s costs to be prohibitive, it won’t actually be that expensive to implement.
That’s because Estonia’s public transit already gets extremely generous subsidies. The state-owned railway operator Elron, for example, will get a €31 million boost from taxpayers next year. The rural bus routes due to go free, meanwhile, are already subsidized to up to 80 percent of cost as it is. Making them entirely fare-less should only cost around €12.9 million ($15.2 million) more—not a vast amount for even a small country such as Estonia.
Getting rid of ticket sales and inspections, meanwhile, will eliminate some overhead—and also cut down on delays. I couldn’t turn up any figures on the actual cost of charging for Estonian bus travel, but on larger, more complex networks such as New York’s MTA, it can reach 6 percent of all budget. When only 20 percent of the bus network’s costs are being recouped from fares, it’s easy to see how maintaining a ticket sale and inspection system can come to seem like a burden worth shedding.
But why is Estonia going so big on free transit now? At its root, this is a form of fiscal redistribution. Rural Estonians, who comprise 32.5 percent of the country’s total population, are generally older and less affluent than their urban counterparts; younger country-born Estonians have increasingly moved to cities and to other countries. The rural parts of this former Soviet state, which joined the E.U. in 2003, thus rely heavily on decent functioning public buses. Making this system free to use for all might help slow this rural population drain.
This essay is reprinted or linked yearly, attesting to my eagerness to remind you that on May Day, while the Louisville area eschews work and focuses its partying proclivities on the ponies, most of the rest of the world takes a holiday amid thoughts about the nature of work itself.
The year 2016 is a tough act to follow. It may have been the finest season ever for personal May Day celebrations.
For one thing, Bernie Sanders was running for president last year. As an independent senator and avowed socialist, the fact that Sanders even exists in the American political non-spectrum is as good an introduction as any to the "real" international workers' holiday.
As an added bonus, we weren't in America at all when May 1, 2016 rolled around. Rather, it was the occasion of our Spring Break in Estonia, and two big surprises during a day trip to Helsinki: Kim Andersen's presence and a delightful though short left-wing May Day parade.
If Ainslie's Tavern comes into being by May 1, 2018, perhaps the tradition of May Day parades can be restored to eternally somnolent New Albany. One time around a city block would suffice to start. I'm sure Develop New Albany stands ready to get on board with this idea.
By the summer of 1987, when I first visited the geopolitical conglomeration formerly known as the Soviet Union, the country’s annual May Day parade in Moscow had long since ceased to be a showcase of international socialism.
Rather, it had reverted to the overt, and was staged as an ideological pageant of nationalistic fervor – a genuine, old-fashioned, patriotic flag-waver for Mother Russia.
For the bedrock Soviet worker, who according to prevailing mythology was the chief beneficiary of international socialism, May Day’s single biggest selling point was being able to avoid the drudgery of the factory for a few precious hours. He’d have rather been on the beach at a posh Black Sea resort in Bulgaria, but what could be done?
At least for a while he could forget about the dystopian Five Year Plan by hopping the subway from his cookie-cutter, high-rise suburb to the historic center of the city, queuing with fellow vodka-bearers, plodding behind the massive missiles through cobblestoned Red Square, and then finally passing the reviewing stand arranged atop Lenin’s Mausoleum for a fleeting glimpse of the jowly old men in furry caps, grimacing arthritically as they waved vacantly into space.
The parade was a choreographed set piece, of course, one fraught with symbolic properties, both for natives seeking clues to the direction of their country apart from the stultifying daily propaganda, and for observers elsewhere, like professional Kremlinologists in the employ of Western intelligence agencies.
These consulting spooks subsequently would examine film of the May Day parade, reshuffle their tea leaves, and strain them through a few hoary apocryphal algorithms. Passwords would be repeated, reports submitted, meetings held, and murmured decisions reached. In appropriately clandestine fashion, money would be exchanged, and a hush briefly might descend, until suddenly, somewhere in the world, a legally elected government was overthrown – first one of the Capitalist paymasters’ choosing, then another selected by the Communists, each in its own turn, serving the dual purpose of preserving the status quo, and stimulating both full erections and full employment among participating secret agents.
---
Long before the decade of the 1980’s, the workers of the world – be they in Akron, Cape Town or Tashkent – already understood that they neither had united, nor shed their chains in any fashion sufficient to exercise control over the means of production.
The stewards of the world’s two great economic “-isms” had divided the planet into manageable spheres of influence, with the non-aligned throngs always ripe for recruitment and exploitation. At the end of a day’s toil, the best way for just plain folks to endure the enforced pieties of a May Day parade -- or a 4th of July picnic -- was to remain under the influence.
As Ernest Hemingway reminds us, the bottle is a blessed means of sovereign action. You first drink from it, and then throw it in the direction of the oppressor. In cases of rotgut, you can drink some of it, and then set the remainder aflame just prior to tossing (see “cocktails, Molotov”).
During the Cold War, Russians and Poles chose vodka. Cubans opted for rum. I always imagined the Czechs and Hungarians to be more fortunate than most, seeing as they possessed beer (Pilsner Urquell) and wine (Egri Bikaver) of a higher uniform quality than produced by Warsaw Pact neighbors.
For Americans, there’d be gallons of insipid ice cold light lager and a few pints of Jack Daniels. Choices from our NATO allies might have ranged from English cask bitter to ouzo in Greece, and from schnapps (Germany) to cider (Spain).
It goes to show that as opiates go, booze is vastly preferable to religion.
---
To recap, May Day takes place on May 1, and generally refers to springtime public holidays in the northern hemisphere, where the cultural tradition began long before Marx, Engels and Gus Hall.
For more than 125 years, May Day also has been considered International Workers' Day, which we Americans eventually chucked to another time on the calendar (Labor Day, at summer’s end) so as to avoid confusion with the Commies. Why? Labor and left-wing political movements first established May 1 as International Workers’ Day in memory of those who were killed and wounded during the Haymarket Massacre in 1886, which took place in Chicago.
In all my trips to Europe, only once did I find myself in position to physically attend a May Day parade. It was in Vienna, in 1987. I got up early and walked into the city center from my hostel across from Westbahnhof, finding a comfortable place to stand along the Ringstrasse near City Hall.
The various unions, workplaces and numbered districts each were represented, and at the end, after the sanctioned social elements had marched past, there were series of menacing, piggybacking trailers: Anarchists, Maoists, random radicals and even a mob of hooded Muslim extremists.
Ah yes, I remember it well. Afterwards, I splurged on schnitzel and local draft beer, reflecting on the way that America’s customarily oblivious exceptionalism has detached its labor holiday from the rest of the world’s.
NA Confidential's mask-free policy on reader comments.
NA Confidential believes in a higher bar than is customary in the blogosphere, and follows a disclosure policy with respect to reader comments.
First, you must be registered with blogger.com according to the procedures specified. This is required not as a means of directing traffic to blogger.com, but to reduce the lamentable instances of flaming and personal attacks on the part of the anonymous.
Second, although pen names are perfectly acceptable, senior editor Roger A. Baylor must be informed of your identity, and according to your preference, it will be kept confidential.
To reiterate, I insist upon this solely to lessen the frequency of malicious anonymity, which unfortunately plagues certain other blogs hereabouts.
You may e-mail Roger at the address given within his profile and explain who you are. Failure to comply means that your comments probably will be deleted -- although the final decision remains ours.
Thanks for reading, and please consider becoming a part of the community here, one that is respectful of the prerequisites of civilized discourse, and that seeks to engage visitors in substantive dialogue.
