The New Albany Tribune, our only local newspaper of record, does not publish on Monday. On Tuesday, two days before the most important City Council meeting of the year, the newspaper devoted its front page to a new missing child program, “Seussical” the musical, and whether it is safe to eat Ohio River fish.
Today, belatedly, the Tribune makes an effort to be topical:
City Council to vote on committing $400k to Scribner Place, by Amany Ali, Tribune City Editor.
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Steadily, and with at least some of the uncertainty eased -- perhaps even inexorably – New Albany’s Scribner Place project seems to be emerging from its navigation of the largest expanse of treacherous by-ways native to the local political process.
Along the way, and irrespective of the final financial details necessary to lift it from the architect’s drawing board to bricks and mortar reality, the conceptual nature of the project itself has garnered an impressive array of endorsements throughout the extended community.
Newspapers, politicians, business associations, neighborhood associations, men and women on the street – all have joined together in rare unanimity to publicly support Scribner Place as a crucial first step toward the betterment of Floyd County in general, and downtown New Albany in particular.
In fact, apart from abrasive, noisy, sel-serving but ultimately negligible fear mongering instigated by an anonymous clique of embittered Internet trolls, there has not been any significant opposition to the overall merits of the project itself, at least on the part of those willing to go on the public record with their objections … and their names.
According to our records, 3rd District Councilman Steve Price is the only one to do so, stating at an S. Ellen Jones Neighborhood Association meeting that he is against Scribner Place, period, and considers the money slated for it to be better used elsewhere.
There may be a handful of other opponents we’ve missed, but at least for some, it has been fiendishly difficult to isolate the precise gene denoting sincerity, since they tend to favor a passive/aggressive approach with respect to hedging their bets, along the lines of “I’m for it, even though it’s going to fail in the end, just like anything New Albany does.”
It is a notoriously poor argument -- it really isn't an argument at all, not that this means anything to the functionally illiterate -- but surely it provides the perfect drumbeat of a segue to the Wizard of Westside, 1st District Councilman Dan Coffey, whose presence on any public stage is the unfailing harbinger of riotous farce.
For reasons that remain hazy amid the unchecked, ward-heeling grandstanding that perpetually defines his daily political performance, Councilman Coffey has at various times spoken both for and against Scribner Place, stating last week that it “has to happen,” but at the same time informing the Courier-Journal that he doubts it will do any good in assisting economic development.
And yet, ever attuned to the surreal, the always opportunistic Councilman Coffey first scattered these conflicting signals the way that your dog putters around the yard, diligently marking territory, then immediately scrambled to reposition himself as the second coming of Neville Chamberlain by waving his blank notebook and offering a compromise plan that would “save” Scribner Place in our time by privatizing it before it was built – thus negating its very reason for existence, and doing so before the first nail is struck.
Because nothing from nothing still leaves nothing, Councilman Coffey's plan was politely applauded and subsequently yawned out of the room, freeing him to return to his favored lesiure time activity of Byzantine plotting in preparation for his next political campaign.
Unfortunately, the saga doesn’t end with Councilman Coffey's barbecued bologna.
The 4th District Councilman Larry Kochert also has tried to have his Scribner Place and gut it, too, by claiming to adore the plan, but qualifying his adoration by tying it to support “in kind” from the county government – and, until very late in the game, not divulging the exact size of the annual support check that he expects the county to cut before he climbs down from the fence he’s lovingly built for maximum straddling.
Between Price’s ongoing and blatant sabotage of the interests of his own increasingly progressive district, Councilman Coffey’s transparently self-aggrandizing efforts to wash Scribner Place right out of the city’s hair, and Councilman Kochert’s demure considerations of citywide dowry (say, a couple hundred thousand a year, a half-ton of tangy Capriole goat cheese and a vat or three of that deelish Huber red vino), one might arrive at the conclusion that some among New Albany’s sitting city council are, shall we say, somewhat less that well equipped to lead the city into the 21st century.
Such a conclusion has the saving virtue of complete accuracy, but more importantly, others on the City Council seemingly are ready to lead, and they’re now the ones who must step to the forefront and hasten the process not only of launching the Scribner Place project, but also of doing so according to the financing plan that makes the most sense for residents of all sizes, and finally (if all that weren’t enough) commencing the process of ending the disruptive Reign of Error foisted on the citizens of New Albany by the council’s Gang of Four.
Likewise, Mayor James Garner must come to the assistance of the council's moderates and act in the best interests of the city of New Albany by forcefully occupying his bully pulpit and resolutely urging the adoption of Option #1 of Scribner Place, Phase I financing, which pledges the city's taxing authority as backing for the project, and consequently will result in a significant savings over the lifetime of the bond.
Readers, you already know that NA Confidential differs with those among us who would seek to tie the city’s future to an exceedingly narrow definition of break-even accomplishment, and who remain far too eager to cite the admittedly numerous failures of the past as an all-purpose excuse not to excel here and now.
In the context of the Scribner Place project, the best way to break New Albany’s seemingly perpetual cycle of underachievement is most emphatically not to try and tiptoe past rearguard roadblocks erected by obstructionist Brambleberries both inside and outside the council, and risk settling for a less seaworthy financing plan that only temporarily stands to appease the irrevocably lost voters of a minority opposed to Scribner Place from the beginning, but rather, to expend the necessary political capital to unapologetically smash to bits New Albany’s detestable inferiority complex by opting for the best available plan.
And that is Option #1.
It is neither the Mayor’s plan, nor the YMCA’s plan; neither NA Confidential’s plan nor "concern taxpayer's" plan, neither your plan nor my plan alone, but rather, New Albany’s Plan.
Beginning this Thursday night, it will be time to get to work on a viable future for this city. Let's support those public servants who see the way forward.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
New Albany's "little people" find their savior, at least for the next five minutes.
Things that make you go “hmmmm” … from the new Diggin’ in the Dirt blog:
—Lt. Governor Becky Skillman got to see Mansion Row Friday afternoon (July 1) during a meet-and-greet for the Republican Party faithful at the Admiral Bicknell Inn. Thanks for the yummy leftover hors d'oeuvres, VA. I love that olive spread.
VA is Valla Ann Bolovschak, owner and innkeeper at the Admiral Bicknell bed and breakfast, and, we’re told, a Bush/Cheney stalwart of long standing.
Under normal circumstances, this information would not be noteworthy, but according to anonymous spokespersons for New Albany’s self-styled “little people,” i.e., disgruntled home owning white Democrats, Valla Ann has arrived in New Albany just in time to lead these supposedly “oppressed” taxpayers on a Norquist-inspired Fatwah against the 21st century.
Uh huh.
Is it just us, or have Early Times sales skyrocketed lately?
Speaking as a fellow businessperson, NA Confidential finds much to like about Valla Ann, and we genuinely respect what she has done to make her home one of the anchors of Mansion Row.
We’ll leave it to others to helpfully explicate the less salutary aspects of Valla Ann’s long-running and very public feud with the Democrat who currently occupies City Hall, noting sadly that her affiliation with the GOP unfortunately runs counter to many of NA Confidential’s personal positions in politics and culture, thus complicating objectivity in such matters.
However, the woefully counter-productive perversity of her new legion of fans is another topic entirely, and one that we can’t help skewering.
By giddily throwing themselves at the feet of a card-carrying Republican, whose party (in explicit national platform terms) is institutionally committed to starving the city to feed the exurb, New Albany’s “mad as hell,” anti-progressive, lunatic fringe seriously undermines its cherished and utterly false self-image as the criminally neglected “little people.”
Actually, this is just as well, since the term “little people” in this context bears no more descriptive meaning than “new and improved” on a jug of generic laundry detergent.
Quite simply, if you’re a home owning white person in New Albany, you’re a “little person” in the same way that George W. Bush is just another chainsaw-toting Texan.
New Albany’s real “little people” are renters at or below the poverty line, underemployed or unemployed, many of them Black and Latino, and few of whom possess the luxury of Internet access to complain of their being downtrodden and ignored.
Few of them are demanding to take “back” their city, because they had little part in it to begin with.
Wildly and disproportionately privileged by comparison with the city’s genuine “little people,” a snarling sub-strata of disaffected, white, middle class, home owning Democrats now turns to a recently arrived Republican to save them from themselves, with arms open and hosannas fully audible, and while this turn of events provides ample grist for examinations into the degradation of the human condition in New Albany, circa ’05, it remains that garbage trucks in high summer have a more favorable aroma than hypocrisy of this malodorous variety.
It is beyond dispute that New Albanians traditionally are their own worst enemies, consistently dismissing palliative measures and bizarrely drawing solace from their own semi-literate depths of futility. One would hope that at some point this recurring cycle of pain would become tiresome to them, but it remains that the truly dysfunctional have no hope of getting better until they want to do so.
The “little people” won’t get any bigger until they stop whimpering and desperately seeking a "leader," shed the populist drivel that thrills them, and start thinking critically about the world that lies outside.
To persist in doing otherwise is to continue being used by those who know better … and to be discarded, yet again, when the usefulness of the “little people” comes to an inevitable end.
—Lt. Governor Becky Skillman got to see Mansion Row Friday afternoon (July 1) during a meet-and-greet for the Republican Party faithful at the Admiral Bicknell Inn. Thanks for the yummy leftover hors d'oeuvres, VA. I love that olive spread.
VA is Valla Ann Bolovschak, owner and innkeeper at the Admiral Bicknell bed and breakfast, and, we’re told, a Bush/Cheney stalwart of long standing.
Under normal circumstances, this information would not be noteworthy, but according to anonymous spokespersons for New Albany’s self-styled “little people,” i.e., disgruntled home owning white Democrats, Valla Ann has arrived in New Albany just in time to lead these supposedly “oppressed” taxpayers on a Norquist-inspired Fatwah against the 21st century.
Uh huh.
Is it just us, or have Early Times sales skyrocketed lately?
Speaking as a fellow businessperson, NA Confidential finds much to like about Valla Ann, and we genuinely respect what she has done to make her home one of the anchors of Mansion Row.
We’ll leave it to others to helpfully explicate the less salutary aspects of Valla Ann’s long-running and very public feud with the Democrat who currently occupies City Hall, noting sadly that her affiliation with the GOP unfortunately runs counter to many of NA Confidential’s personal positions in politics and culture, thus complicating objectivity in such matters.
However, the woefully counter-productive perversity of her new legion of fans is another topic entirely, and one that we can’t help skewering.
By giddily throwing themselves at the feet of a card-carrying Republican, whose party (in explicit national platform terms) is institutionally committed to starving the city to feed the exurb, New Albany’s “mad as hell,” anti-progressive, lunatic fringe seriously undermines its cherished and utterly false self-image as the criminally neglected “little people.”
Actually, this is just as well, since the term “little people” in this context bears no more descriptive meaning than “new and improved” on a jug of generic laundry detergent.
Quite simply, if you’re a home owning white person in New Albany, you’re a “little person” in the same way that George W. Bush is just another chainsaw-toting Texan.
New Albany’s real “little people” are renters at or below the poverty line, underemployed or unemployed, many of them Black and Latino, and few of whom possess the luxury of Internet access to complain of their being downtrodden and ignored.
Few of them are demanding to take “back” their city, because they had little part in it to begin with.
Wildly and disproportionately privileged by comparison with the city’s genuine “little people,” a snarling sub-strata of disaffected, white, middle class, home owning Democrats now turns to a recently arrived Republican to save them from themselves, with arms open and hosannas fully audible, and while this turn of events provides ample grist for examinations into the degradation of the human condition in New Albany, circa ’05, it remains that garbage trucks in high summer have a more favorable aroma than hypocrisy of this malodorous variety.
It is beyond dispute that New Albanians traditionally are their own worst enemies, consistently dismissing palliative measures and bizarrely drawing solace from their own semi-literate depths of futility. One would hope that at some point this recurring cycle of pain would become tiresome to them, but it remains that the truly dysfunctional have no hope of getting better until they want to do so.
The “little people” won’t get any bigger until they stop whimpering and desperately seeking a "leader," shed the populist drivel that thrills them, and start thinking critically about the world that lies outside.
To persist in doing otherwise is to continue being used by those who know better … and to be discarded, yet again, when the usefulness of the “little people” comes to an inevitable end.
$4 haircuts return to downtown New Albany.
Yes!
Man working to revive a dying profession with NA-based barber college, by Chris Morris, Tribune Managing Editor.
Randy Smith and I met the owner, Marshall Pence, a while back when he stopped into Destinations Booksellers.
We talked him into taking in a city council meeting that same night, and Councilman Cappuccino’s bravura performance made quite an impression on Marshall.
Happily, Marshall decided to open the barber college, anyway.
Good luck, and welcome to New Albany. I need a haircut badly ...
Man working to revive a dying profession with NA-based barber college, by Chris Morris, Tribune Managing Editor.
Randy Smith and I met the owner, Marshall Pence, a while back when he stopped into Destinations Booksellers.
We talked him into taking in a city council meeting that same night, and Councilman Cappuccino’s bravura performance made quite an impression on Marshall.
Happily, Marshall decided to open the barber college, anyway.
Good luck, and welcome to New Albany. I need a haircut badly ...
Monday, July 04, 2005
Here's a cause that "Concern Taxpayer" and "NA Resident" can really get behind.
Poor Writing Costs Taxpayers Millions, by Justin Pope, AP Education Writer.
"States spend nearly a quarter of a billion dollars a year on remedial writing instruction for their employees, according to a new report that says the indirect costs of sloppy writing probably hurt taxpayers even more."
And the taxpayer advocates themselves?
"States spend nearly a quarter of a billion dollars a year on remedial writing instruction for their employees, according to a new report that says the indirect costs of sloppy writing probably hurt taxpayers even more."
And the taxpayer advocates themselves?
The Declaration: No rhetoric -- just read it!
The Declaration of Independence ... from the Avalon Project at Yale Law School.
Sunday, July 03, 2005
Corn on the 3rd of July?
Mrs. Confidential and I made a belated appearance this evening at the official New Albany 4th of July celebration at the venerable Trinkle Dome on the riverfront.
The fireworks were far better than I expected, the music was loud enough to be heard on Spring Street, the overall church supper ambience a fitting testament to booking agent Bob "Stone Deaf Band" Trinkle’s formica-clad genius for the lowest common denominator, and the obligatory rendering of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” depressing beyond the ability of mere words to convey.
Did I mention that the fireworks were good?
The fireworks were far better than I expected, the music was loud enough to be heard on Spring Street, the overall church supper ambience a fitting testament to booking agent Bob "Stone Deaf Band" Trinkle’s formica-clad genius for the lowest common denominator, and the obligatory rendering of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” depressing beyond the ability of mere words to convey.
Did I mention that the fireworks were good?
Saturday, July 02, 2005
"You Can't Go Home Again": Progress and good beer in New Albany.
I've tried to write for as long as I can remember, and for just as long, the written word has alternately soothed and mocked me.
During these many years of heartwarming successes and teeth-grinding failures, my otherwise fickle muse has consistently advocated one thing above all else: Write about what you know.
So, I began writing about beer in earnest in 1990, and if memory serves me, tens of thousands of my words on the topic of beer were offered pro bono to the planet at large until 1999, when the Louisville Eccentric Observer (LEO) agreed to pay me $40 to spend $800 of my own money for a trip to Denver, Colorado, and an article on the Great American Beer Festival.
For the past year, I've contributed a beer column to Food & Dining, a Louisville-based quarterly magazine that is essential reading for local restaurant goers.
Since November, 2004, many of you have been reading this blog, and you're probably asking a perfectly legitimate question: What does beer and beer writing have to do with the life and times of New Albany, and specifically, with the stated aim of NA Confidential?
My answer lies within the following piece, first written in 1998, and republished here for the umpteenth time. A good number of you have read it before, and I appreciate your indulgence as I post it for the consideration of the many who have not.
Consider it the longest business card in the world, and it just might make more sense.
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You Can't Go Home Again.
I had my back to the light and my face was upon the things where the light fell. My face, by which I looked upon things that were in the light, was itself in the darkness ... Augustine, Bishop of Hippo
There may be Biblical precedents for the notion of the self-analytical literary confession, although to my knowledge the first writer to explore the idea that "it takes one to know one" was Augustine (born 354 A.D.), later made St. Augustine, but at the time just an ordinary cleric obsessed with his sinful past.
From the vantage point of later life, and during the course of various ruminations that were designed to make the case for conversion to Christianity, Augustine freely referred to his youthful lusts, debaucheries and indiscretions, cataloguing and dissecting them, and offering them for the painful scrutiny of his readers.
By doing so, he became perhaps the first public figure to emit a primal scream, predating John Lennon by at least 1,550 years, unburdening himself as a means of seeking catharsis for seemingly irreconcilable inner desires, addressing his internal dissonance, recognizing it, and conquering it in the name of something far better.
For Augustine, the problem was sin.
For the Potable Curmudgeon, it is swill.
It has been a long and arduous path to self-knowledge, trudging upwards from the desperate and degraded depths of Schaefer "Weekender" 30-packs to the sublime pinnacle of vintage Alaskan Smoked Porter, but at least the swill-soaked years of my wayward youth were not passed in vain. From them are derived valuable glimpses into the human psyche, and possible explanations for why the majority of American beer drinkers remain in the same abject, leaden state of bondage that I managed to forego.
How do I know this shtick so well?
Because I was there, baby. I could spend the next decade drinking Guinness, and I’m still not sure the overall balance of a lifetime would be tilted to good beer over bad. The truth is, I was really bad for a long, long time … and then I got better, although it took a long, long time.
Now I’d like to see to it that you don’t have to go through the same thing. I want to make the world safe for drinkers of good beer, and for the next generation to be spared the hardships we had to endure.
There are questions: Must one necessarily experience bad beer to gain an appreciation for good beer, or can understanding and knowledge of the good somehow be gained in the absence of the bad, and without that point of comparison?
What happens to you when you gain knowledge of the good, but see so much bad still entrenched all around you?
How the hell did I get here?
Apart from a handful of wee nips as a child, taken from bottles of my father’s beer, my first solo "cold one" was consumed at a junior high school party. Actually, four of us split a can of (shudder … cough … it wasn’t easy for Augustine, either) Budweiser. The primary objective of this action, which took place out in the woods, a safe distance from the prying eyes of the hostess’s parents, seemed to be the establishment of street credibility by having beer on our breaths and mimicking the outward appearances of drunkenness, with which all were familiar, if not by personal experience.
It was a stormy April a year later when the gang staged the first of many campouts at the Floyds Knobs farm of one of my closest friends at the time. I dutifully helped to drag three cases of Fall City longnecks up a wooded bluff, leading from the chilly waters of a creek where they had been hidden by a sympathetic senior football player.
For these efforts, I was amply rewarded with by first genuine and unstaged bout of inebriation, a rite of passage made tolerable by the icy flavorlessness of the beer, which numbed my teeth, bolstered my confidence, and gave me an escape from shyness.
We were oblivious to the elements, paying no heed to the rising wind and rain that heralded the arrival of a storm, but Jeff’s parents were paying attention, and soon we saw the headlights from their pickup truck coming down the dirt path. We were told that tornadoes had been spotted, and we’d best move the party, beer and all, to the barn by the house. Our paranoia subsided once we realized that they didn’t care about our drinking as long as we stayed put, and we piled into the bed of the pickup, lay on our backs, stared up into the swirling eternity and swore through stinging raindrops that we could see tornadoes fornicating – except that wasn’t the exact word we used.
Another year later, when my friends began getting their driver's licenses, the bountiful paradise of Louisville’s west end liquor stores beckoned to us, just beyond the provincial confines of New Albany, down Vincennes Street to the K & I toll bridge, and over the Ohio River into Portland. It was then that the frustrating struggle to find a brand of beer that did not totally disgust me began in earnest.
Owing to my sadistically youthful appearance, I wasn’t often the one chosen to go inside Liken’s or the Corner Store and try to get served, so I was at the mercy of my companions’s tastes in beer. This was problematic, because at this stage the "flavor" of a beer was little more than an unpleasant impediment to ingesting its alcohol and trying to look cool while grimacing. My friends liked Sterling and Pabst; I didn’t, but they were doing the work, and I was in no position to argue, so I had to adapt.
I was never very good at math, but some numbers added up for me: The colder the beer was kept, the less taste it would have, and the more I could drink of it. My mission in life became cooler maintenance, to take the cheapest styrofoam cooler I could find, nurture it, protect it from harm, and most importantly, to keep it filled with ice. If I could keep the bottom from falling out and find a safe place to stash it, we could save a buck or two the following weekend.
This helped. However, summertime meant that I had problems finishing the beers before they began to get warm. This led to embarrassment on more than one occasion. I would be jammed into the back seat of a late model junker, without the female companionship that the backseat imagery of rock ‘n’ roll demands, but with an ice-cold can of beer straight from the cooler, gamely making it through the first frozen gulps, then suffering the dismaying recognition that it still was Sterling, Pabst, and Falls City, and realizing that it tasted too bad to finish.
After a sufficient interval had passed, and I determined that I was supposed to have finished the now warmed and thoroughly vile beer, I would throw the "empty" out the window -- but in the still of a humid summer evening’s drive in the countryside, I sometimes misjudged the distance from the open window of the moving car to the stationary, muffled cushion of a grassy roadside.
The ignominy was instant and damning: A loud "thump" as the half-full can hit the unrelenting pavement, and the abuse that followed, not all good-natured, because after all, we drove all the way to Louisville for that beer and spent every last dime we had on it, so how the hell can you waste it like that!
It was in this manner, slumped shamefully in the back seat of my friend’s car trying to choke down a warm Sterling, that I resolved to become a better beer drinker than all of them. I was an athlete then, and contrary to legend, I never drank during basketball season (although beer and baseball went together like, well, beer and baseball), so my beer drinking practice sessions had to be squeezed in during summer and off-seasons.
Others began to plan their careers in physics, cosmetology, and insurance sales; meanwhile, I conspired to be the best at beer. Gradually, over time, things began to fall into place.
I found a beer that I really liked: Schlitz in the 16-oz "tall boy" cans. Next, there was a craze for Little Millers and Little Kings; at only 7 oz each, they could be consumed before they got warm, and in multiple doses that gave good story: "Yeah, we each had 12 beers on the way over here." I learned that malt liquor packed a punch, especially when clad in those bright silvery blue cans of the Bull.
Finally, America’s beer barons came through with the ultimate solution for the problem of teenage drinkers who wanted to drink beer, but couldn’t cope with the rough pungency of the full-flavored beers of the post WWII era: Light, low-calorie lagers, of which Miller’s Lite was the first widely distributed example, although there were others, like Anheuser-Busch’s Natural Light.
The advent of light beer was a revolution, albeit a regressive one, and after a quarter century of light beer, it’s almost impossible to remember the time before it became as much a part of the fabric of American life as white sandwich bread baked from the paste that your elementary teacher used to warn you against eating.
What she didn’t tell you is that if you add water and ferment the paste, it becomes light beer, with all the character you would expect from such a concoction, which is none; this was the point then, and it remains the point now, and it’s easy to see why light beer became such a phenomenon.
When I became a bit older and began visiting bars -- not before 1979, when I was 19, and gaining in frequency to the present day – most of the old men were drinking traditional manly beers like Pabst, Sterling and Miller High Life. At some point shortly thereafter, I became aware that almost all of them had switched to Lite, Bud Light and even Old Milwaukee Light. Price seemingly wasn’t the issue; if anything, they’d traded up and were paying more to cover the cost of Miller’s television ads.
After long consideration, I concluded that a lifetime of Sterling and City finally had gotten to them, and when they realized that light beer was socially acceptable to their peers, under the rationalization that it was less filling, thus enabling them to drink even more beer than before, they fled their traditional brands as fast as their terminally damaged taste buds would carry them. Better the nothingness of wet air than something terminally foul, and you could hear the sighs of relief in air-conditioned lounges and softball fields all across the nation.
The advent of light beer, the castrato of the world of beer, had the same effect on me, at least initially. Less flavor in a beer really was desirable when compared with the odiousness of full flavor at the time, and in the absence of any other standard of comparison that might define full flavor in a positive fashion.
In an odd sort of way, and one that might have been avoided if other stylistic choices were readily available as they are today, light beer became a step-ladder for me. I was able to drink enough of it, and sufficiently often, to finally develop a taste for the generic entity of "beer flavor," which I would define as those qualities helping to differentiate between beer, cola and orange juice, and which light beers do possess, albeit it in a substantially diluted form.
The olfactory convenience of light beer bought me some time, and in sheer bulk it helped to satisfy some of the frantically hormonal cravings of my college days. It wasn’t drinking, it was swallowing; it was affordable, and this suited me at the time.
It didn’t suit me for long. Light beer may have been a utilitarian means to an end, and a temporary release (not unlike masturbation), but to me it never was an end itself, even when I was drinking it. When I reached the magical, mystical age of 21, the legally mandated pressures of adolescence were suddenly gone (although the self-imposed cultural ones remained), and finally I could examine the wares at Cut Rate Liquors in Jeffersonville at my leisure.
There were many imported beers, a few of which were British ales, and many more international lagers. Money was a problem, so sampling these beers meant splurging, but at least they were different, and they hinted at broader horizons.
Fortunately for me, two good friends intervened at this juncture and were able to provide personal testimony for two of the mysterious beers on Cut Rate’s import shelf, and the impact of tasting these two previously unknown beverages would have a profound effect on my way of thinking about beer.
Larry went away to college and returned with Guinness Extra Stout, and Dave did the same, introducing me to Pilsner Urquell, then sold in four-pack cartons for a lofty $3.99 plus sales tax.
I was intrigued. I’d had Molson, Labatts and Beck’s, but what was the spicy flavor in the Pilsner Urquell, that piquant bitterness cutting through creamy grain flavor, and something that I didn’t remember experiencing before? Dave wasn’t sure, but he thought it was the hops. Whatever it was, I liked it, and the Guinness, black like coffee, dry and heavy, macho in some way that I was not able to put into words, was unlike any "dark" beer I’d ever had.
You mean there were different sorts of dark beers, too? Dark beers were not new to me, although I hadn’t the first idea why they were dark, or how they were made, or how they differed from the massive blackness of Guinness that cut a swath through my soul.
arly on, in ’78 or thereabouts, there had been a dark beer from a long-defunct Chicago brewery called Peter Hand (it also made an extra light beer of some sort), and it was followed onto Cut Rate’s shelves by Augsburger Dark. Occasionally we had purchased Lowenbrau Dark, having accepted without question Miller’s advertising strategy of "tonight, let it be Lowenbrau," and saving the Americanized version of a German dunkel for special times.
There had been other sightings of dark, but none like Guinness. Don Da Leon’s, a deli and imported foods store located in the Quadrangle in Jeff, was far ahead of its time (I had a bottle of Kirin there in 1978) and put Schlitz Dark on draft some time around 1981, but even before that, Mario’s Pizza on Charlestown Road in New Albany had a dark beer, the brand now forgotten, on draft.
Just after having Guinness for the first time, I saw Stroh’s Bock and tried it. What was bock? It was what was left over at the bottom of the vats after spring cleaning each year, or so I was told, with serene and authoritative confidence, by an old man at Steinert’s who said he wouldn’t touch the dark stuff for fear of its 20% alcohol content. Later, when I learned that the tales of spring scrubbing and heightened potency were utter nonsense, I was embarrassed for having been so stupid.
At first, we mixed the Guinness with lager beers; on more than one occasion, we took a six-pack into the K & H Café in Lanesville and made black and tans with draft Budweiser. The Gods saw fit not to punish me for this transgression, and soon I graduated to straight Guinness … and I’ve been there ever since. As Mark Francis once noted, the perfect Black and Tan isn’t halves of stout and pale ale mixed in a glass, it’s a pint of each, mixed in your stomach.
Unfortunately, there were many years of practice and refinement yet to come, because merely being introduced to good beers like Guinness and Pilsner Urquell did not automatically transport me to a state of pure bliss and enlightenment. Progress was painstaking and incremental, with old, tested temptations and new, unexplored domains vying for hegemony over my mind, my palate and my wallet.
By 1983, I was working part-time at the old Scoreboard Liquors in New Albany and seeking to stock one door of the walk-in cooler with imports (remember, micros were still several years away), and I continued to do this right up until 1992, when I went into the business at Rich O’s.
Beginning around 1984, I would no longer drink light, low-calorie beer. In 1985, I traveled to Europe for the first time, and this was followed by journeys in 1987, 1989 and 1991, and others since. After each trip, it was harder than the one before to go back to my old haunts and to drink cans of Strohs or draft Budweiser, but I must confess that I did go back and do precisely that, at least until 1992. Even the inception of the FOSSILS homebrewing club in 1990 did not entirely divert my attention away from the swill that had ruled my youth, although I can truthfully say that Budweiser has not touched my lips for almost
six years.
I don’t know why it took so long for these obvious lessons to take root. For ten years, between my first Guinness and my last can of atrocious Budweiser aboard an Amtrak train bound to Chicago for a job interview and a visit to the Goose Island brewpub, around four lengthy trips to Europe and submersion in the continent’s still vibrant beer culture, and right up through the first year and a half of FOSSILS, swill remained a part of my life. I can say that swill’s hold over me steadily diminished during this time, but this does little to absolve me.
However, I can spot a few trends that help to understand my actions, and by extension, provide some insight into the motivations of the unenlightened majority of the population, for whom the arguments I’m setting forth here are no more relevant than the theological abstractions of the medieval academics who transformed Augustine’s earnestness into dogma to undergird the Inquisition.
You can’t know what you’re missing if you haven’t been exposed to it, and when you have, familiar habits and conveniences don’t change easily.
It takes an act of calculated volition to escape the subtle noose of conformity that American consumer culture imperceptibly tightens with every ubiquitous ploy in its considerable arsenal, with every billboard, television advertisement and sponsorship agreement that assaults our senses in a typical day.
To begin escaping it, you have to be willing to question beliefs that seem all the more sacrosanct owing to the almost religious conviction with which they are advanced.
You must try to cease thinking in terms of packaging and presentation, and begin thinking in terms of essences and ultimates, to abandon the orthodoxy that more for less is always better, and to recognize that enlightenment is far preferable to ignorance even when broader understanding brings with it "unpatriotic" and "antisocial" perceptions and connotations on the part of your peers.
This last part is the hardest part. It comes when you’ve been able to do these things, and by doing so, you find yourself utterly and irrevocably at odds with the culture of your upbringing. The past and the people who populated it retain a pull on you, but you know that you can never go back to it. It, and they, will have to come to you – or be damned.
It is unlikely that Augustine drank beer. If he did, it wasn’t beer as we know it today, but human nature is a constant that pulses throughout the long, intervening centuries. He lived in an age when certainties were being methodically stripped away as the Roman empire disintegrated into chaos, and numerous other forces competed to occupy the resulting vacuum. In the midst of societal disarray, he looked at himself and saw obvious parallels with his past, with his own aimlessness, lewdness, and overall lack of thought and misdirection, and although his memories of earlier times were in many respects remarkably balanced, seemingly to the point of nostalgia in some instances, they symbolized a life and a mode of thinking that were no longer options for him. They comprised a life he could no longer live.
His mature Christian beliefs were a framework for self-interpretation, as well as providing the foundation for his advocacy of Christian belief as the balm for troubled days in the present, and as a means of transcending the old ways collapsing all around his world.
For my money, the sociology of human beings making alcoholic beverages and drinking them, both privately and publicly, is the most complex, intimate and fascinating of all such systems that seek to explain our behavior in the context of interaction with others. All the elements are there: Religiosity, education, science, individual and group psychology … on and on, with all aspects of the human experience, the bodies and the blood, capable of being poured into a glass and consumed.
The power and intensity of the metaphor is enhanced by knowledge, and this alters your relationship with the people who are taking part, and with the elixir in the glass.
Of course, one tinkers with these fragile relationships at his own peril; once released, the genie might be reluctant to crawl meekly back into the bottle, and so it has been with me. It takes a certain hardness of heart to realize that your beliefs are beyond compromise, even if the result is a schism with the past.
I’ve come a long way toward achieving my goal of being a better beer drinker than all the rest of them – not in terms of volume, but in terms of understanding. If celebrating this accomplishment means sharing with them the detestable liquid that started us all down this path, and partaking of the liquid they still venerate, as though nothing has changed in twenty years of incessant, clamorous change, then I’ll have to regrettably pass, and urge them to come to me on my terms … or not at all.
During these many years of heartwarming successes and teeth-grinding failures, my otherwise fickle muse has consistently advocated one thing above all else: Write about what you know.
So, I began writing about beer in earnest in 1990, and if memory serves me, tens of thousands of my words on the topic of beer were offered pro bono to the planet at large until 1999, when the Louisville Eccentric Observer (LEO) agreed to pay me $40 to spend $800 of my own money for a trip to Denver, Colorado, and an article on the Great American Beer Festival.
For the past year, I've contributed a beer column to Food & Dining, a Louisville-based quarterly magazine that is essential reading for local restaurant goers.
Since November, 2004, many of you have been reading this blog, and you're probably asking a perfectly legitimate question: What does beer and beer writing have to do with the life and times of New Albany, and specifically, with the stated aim of NA Confidential?
My answer lies within the following piece, first written in 1998, and republished here for the umpteenth time. A good number of you have read it before, and I appreciate your indulgence as I post it for the consideration of the many who have not.
Consider it the longest business card in the world, and it just might make more sense.
-------
You Can't Go Home Again.
I had my back to the light and my face was upon the things where the light fell. My face, by which I looked upon things that were in the light, was itself in the darkness ... Augustine, Bishop of Hippo
There may be Biblical precedents for the notion of the self-analytical literary confession, although to my knowledge the first writer to explore the idea that "it takes one to know one" was Augustine (born 354 A.D.), later made St. Augustine, but at the time just an ordinary cleric obsessed with his sinful past.
From the vantage point of later life, and during the course of various ruminations that were designed to make the case for conversion to Christianity, Augustine freely referred to his youthful lusts, debaucheries and indiscretions, cataloguing and dissecting them, and offering them for the painful scrutiny of his readers.
By doing so, he became perhaps the first public figure to emit a primal scream, predating John Lennon by at least 1,550 years, unburdening himself as a means of seeking catharsis for seemingly irreconcilable inner desires, addressing his internal dissonance, recognizing it, and conquering it in the name of something far better.
For Augustine, the problem was sin.
For the Potable Curmudgeon, it is swill.
It has been a long and arduous path to self-knowledge, trudging upwards from the desperate and degraded depths of Schaefer "Weekender" 30-packs to the sublime pinnacle of vintage Alaskan Smoked Porter, but at least the swill-soaked years of my wayward youth were not passed in vain. From them are derived valuable glimpses into the human psyche, and possible explanations for why the majority of American beer drinkers remain in the same abject, leaden state of bondage that I managed to forego.
How do I know this shtick so well?
Because I was there, baby. I could spend the next decade drinking Guinness, and I’m still not sure the overall balance of a lifetime would be tilted to good beer over bad. The truth is, I was really bad for a long, long time … and then I got better, although it took a long, long time.
Now I’d like to see to it that you don’t have to go through the same thing. I want to make the world safe for drinkers of good beer, and for the next generation to be spared the hardships we had to endure.
There are questions: Must one necessarily experience bad beer to gain an appreciation for good beer, or can understanding and knowledge of the good somehow be gained in the absence of the bad, and without that point of comparison?
What happens to you when you gain knowledge of the good, but see so much bad still entrenched all around you?
How the hell did I get here?
Apart from a handful of wee nips as a child, taken from bottles of my father’s beer, my first solo "cold one" was consumed at a junior high school party. Actually, four of us split a can of (shudder … cough … it wasn’t easy for Augustine, either) Budweiser. The primary objective of this action, which took place out in the woods, a safe distance from the prying eyes of the hostess’s parents, seemed to be the establishment of street credibility by having beer on our breaths and mimicking the outward appearances of drunkenness, with which all were familiar, if not by personal experience.
It was a stormy April a year later when the gang staged the first of many campouts at the Floyds Knobs farm of one of my closest friends at the time. I dutifully helped to drag three cases of Fall City longnecks up a wooded bluff, leading from the chilly waters of a creek where they had been hidden by a sympathetic senior football player.
For these efforts, I was amply rewarded with by first genuine and unstaged bout of inebriation, a rite of passage made tolerable by the icy flavorlessness of the beer, which numbed my teeth, bolstered my confidence, and gave me an escape from shyness.
We were oblivious to the elements, paying no heed to the rising wind and rain that heralded the arrival of a storm, but Jeff’s parents were paying attention, and soon we saw the headlights from their pickup truck coming down the dirt path. We were told that tornadoes had been spotted, and we’d best move the party, beer and all, to the barn by the house. Our paranoia subsided once we realized that they didn’t care about our drinking as long as we stayed put, and we piled into the bed of the pickup, lay on our backs, stared up into the swirling eternity and swore through stinging raindrops that we could see tornadoes fornicating – except that wasn’t the exact word we used.
Another year later, when my friends began getting their driver's licenses, the bountiful paradise of Louisville’s west end liquor stores beckoned to us, just beyond the provincial confines of New Albany, down Vincennes Street to the K & I toll bridge, and over the Ohio River into Portland. It was then that the frustrating struggle to find a brand of beer that did not totally disgust me began in earnest.
Owing to my sadistically youthful appearance, I wasn’t often the one chosen to go inside Liken’s or the Corner Store and try to get served, so I was at the mercy of my companions’s tastes in beer. This was problematic, because at this stage the "flavor" of a beer was little more than an unpleasant impediment to ingesting its alcohol and trying to look cool while grimacing. My friends liked Sterling and Pabst; I didn’t, but they were doing the work, and I was in no position to argue, so I had to adapt.
I was never very good at math, but some numbers added up for me: The colder the beer was kept, the less taste it would have, and the more I could drink of it. My mission in life became cooler maintenance, to take the cheapest styrofoam cooler I could find, nurture it, protect it from harm, and most importantly, to keep it filled with ice. If I could keep the bottom from falling out and find a safe place to stash it, we could save a buck or two the following weekend.
This helped. However, summertime meant that I had problems finishing the beers before they began to get warm. This led to embarrassment on more than one occasion. I would be jammed into the back seat of a late model junker, without the female companionship that the backseat imagery of rock ‘n’ roll demands, but with an ice-cold can of beer straight from the cooler, gamely making it through the first frozen gulps, then suffering the dismaying recognition that it still was Sterling, Pabst, and Falls City, and realizing that it tasted too bad to finish.
After a sufficient interval had passed, and I determined that I was supposed to have finished the now warmed and thoroughly vile beer, I would throw the "empty" out the window -- but in the still of a humid summer evening’s drive in the countryside, I sometimes misjudged the distance from the open window of the moving car to the stationary, muffled cushion of a grassy roadside.
The ignominy was instant and damning: A loud "thump" as the half-full can hit the unrelenting pavement, and the abuse that followed, not all good-natured, because after all, we drove all the way to Louisville for that beer and spent every last dime we had on it, so how the hell can you waste it like that!
It was in this manner, slumped shamefully in the back seat of my friend’s car trying to choke down a warm Sterling, that I resolved to become a better beer drinker than all of them. I was an athlete then, and contrary to legend, I never drank during basketball season (although beer and baseball went together like, well, beer and baseball), so my beer drinking practice sessions had to be squeezed in during summer and off-seasons.
Others began to plan their careers in physics, cosmetology, and insurance sales; meanwhile, I conspired to be the best at beer. Gradually, over time, things began to fall into place.
I found a beer that I really liked: Schlitz in the 16-oz "tall boy" cans. Next, there was a craze for Little Millers and Little Kings; at only 7 oz each, they could be consumed before they got warm, and in multiple doses that gave good story: "Yeah, we each had 12 beers on the way over here." I learned that malt liquor packed a punch, especially when clad in those bright silvery blue cans of the Bull.
Finally, America’s beer barons came through with the ultimate solution for the problem of teenage drinkers who wanted to drink beer, but couldn’t cope with the rough pungency of the full-flavored beers of the post WWII era: Light, low-calorie lagers, of which Miller’s Lite was the first widely distributed example, although there were others, like Anheuser-Busch’s Natural Light.
The advent of light beer was a revolution, albeit a regressive one, and after a quarter century of light beer, it’s almost impossible to remember the time before it became as much a part of the fabric of American life as white sandwich bread baked from the paste that your elementary teacher used to warn you against eating.
What she didn’t tell you is that if you add water and ferment the paste, it becomes light beer, with all the character you would expect from such a concoction, which is none; this was the point then, and it remains the point now, and it’s easy to see why light beer became such a phenomenon.
When I became a bit older and began visiting bars -- not before 1979, when I was 19, and gaining in frequency to the present day – most of the old men were drinking traditional manly beers like Pabst, Sterling and Miller High Life. At some point shortly thereafter, I became aware that almost all of them had switched to Lite, Bud Light and even Old Milwaukee Light. Price seemingly wasn’t the issue; if anything, they’d traded up and were paying more to cover the cost of Miller’s television ads.
After long consideration, I concluded that a lifetime of Sterling and City finally had gotten to them, and when they realized that light beer was socially acceptable to their peers, under the rationalization that it was less filling, thus enabling them to drink even more beer than before, they fled their traditional brands as fast as their terminally damaged taste buds would carry them. Better the nothingness of wet air than something terminally foul, and you could hear the sighs of relief in air-conditioned lounges and softball fields all across the nation.
The advent of light beer, the castrato of the world of beer, had the same effect on me, at least initially. Less flavor in a beer really was desirable when compared with the odiousness of full flavor at the time, and in the absence of any other standard of comparison that might define full flavor in a positive fashion.
In an odd sort of way, and one that might have been avoided if other stylistic choices were readily available as they are today, light beer became a step-ladder for me. I was able to drink enough of it, and sufficiently often, to finally develop a taste for the generic entity of "beer flavor," which I would define as those qualities helping to differentiate between beer, cola and orange juice, and which light beers do possess, albeit it in a substantially diluted form.
The olfactory convenience of light beer bought me some time, and in sheer bulk it helped to satisfy some of the frantically hormonal cravings of my college days. It wasn’t drinking, it was swallowing; it was affordable, and this suited me at the time.
It didn’t suit me for long. Light beer may have been a utilitarian means to an end, and a temporary release (not unlike masturbation), but to me it never was an end itself, even when I was drinking it. When I reached the magical, mystical age of 21, the legally mandated pressures of adolescence were suddenly gone (although the self-imposed cultural ones remained), and finally I could examine the wares at Cut Rate Liquors in Jeffersonville at my leisure.
There were many imported beers, a few of which were British ales, and many more international lagers. Money was a problem, so sampling these beers meant splurging, but at least they were different, and they hinted at broader horizons.
Fortunately for me, two good friends intervened at this juncture and were able to provide personal testimony for two of the mysterious beers on Cut Rate’s import shelf, and the impact of tasting these two previously unknown beverages would have a profound effect on my way of thinking about beer.
Larry went away to college and returned with Guinness Extra Stout, and Dave did the same, introducing me to Pilsner Urquell, then sold in four-pack cartons for a lofty $3.99 plus sales tax.
I was intrigued. I’d had Molson, Labatts and Beck’s, but what was the spicy flavor in the Pilsner Urquell, that piquant bitterness cutting through creamy grain flavor, and something that I didn’t remember experiencing before? Dave wasn’t sure, but he thought it was the hops. Whatever it was, I liked it, and the Guinness, black like coffee, dry and heavy, macho in some way that I was not able to put into words, was unlike any "dark" beer I’d ever had.
You mean there were different sorts of dark beers, too? Dark beers were not new to me, although I hadn’t the first idea why they were dark, or how they were made, or how they differed from the massive blackness of Guinness that cut a swath through my soul.
arly on, in ’78 or thereabouts, there had been a dark beer from a long-defunct Chicago brewery called Peter Hand (it also made an extra light beer of some sort), and it was followed onto Cut Rate’s shelves by Augsburger Dark. Occasionally we had purchased Lowenbrau Dark, having accepted without question Miller’s advertising strategy of "tonight, let it be Lowenbrau," and saving the Americanized version of a German dunkel for special times.
There had been other sightings of dark, but none like Guinness. Don Da Leon’s, a deli and imported foods store located in the Quadrangle in Jeff, was far ahead of its time (I had a bottle of Kirin there in 1978) and put Schlitz Dark on draft some time around 1981, but even before that, Mario’s Pizza on Charlestown Road in New Albany had a dark beer, the brand now forgotten, on draft.
Just after having Guinness for the first time, I saw Stroh’s Bock and tried it. What was bock? It was what was left over at the bottom of the vats after spring cleaning each year, or so I was told, with serene and authoritative confidence, by an old man at Steinert’s who said he wouldn’t touch the dark stuff for fear of its 20% alcohol content. Later, when I learned that the tales of spring scrubbing and heightened potency were utter nonsense, I was embarrassed for having been so stupid.
At first, we mixed the Guinness with lager beers; on more than one occasion, we took a six-pack into the K & H Café in Lanesville and made black and tans with draft Budweiser. The Gods saw fit not to punish me for this transgression, and soon I graduated to straight Guinness … and I’ve been there ever since. As Mark Francis once noted, the perfect Black and Tan isn’t halves of stout and pale ale mixed in a glass, it’s a pint of each, mixed in your stomach.
Unfortunately, there were many years of practice and refinement yet to come, because merely being introduced to good beers like Guinness and Pilsner Urquell did not automatically transport me to a state of pure bliss and enlightenment. Progress was painstaking and incremental, with old, tested temptations and new, unexplored domains vying for hegemony over my mind, my palate and my wallet.
By 1983, I was working part-time at the old Scoreboard Liquors in New Albany and seeking to stock one door of the walk-in cooler with imports (remember, micros were still several years away), and I continued to do this right up until 1992, when I went into the business at Rich O’s.
Beginning around 1984, I would no longer drink light, low-calorie beer. In 1985, I traveled to Europe for the first time, and this was followed by journeys in 1987, 1989 and 1991, and others since. After each trip, it was harder than the one before to go back to my old haunts and to drink cans of Strohs or draft Budweiser, but I must confess that I did go back and do precisely that, at least until 1992. Even the inception of the FOSSILS homebrewing club in 1990 did not entirely divert my attention away from the swill that had ruled my youth, although I can truthfully say that Budweiser has not touched my lips for almost
six years.
I don’t know why it took so long for these obvious lessons to take root. For ten years, between my first Guinness and my last can of atrocious Budweiser aboard an Amtrak train bound to Chicago for a job interview and a visit to the Goose Island brewpub, around four lengthy trips to Europe and submersion in the continent’s still vibrant beer culture, and right up through the first year and a half of FOSSILS, swill remained a part of my life. I can say that swill’s hold over me steadily diminished during this time, but this does little to absolve me.
However, I can spot a few trends that help to understand my actions, and by extension, provide some insight into the motivations of the unenlightened majority of the population, for whom the arguments I’m setting forth here are no more relevant than the theological abstractions of the medieval academics who transformed Augustine’s earnestness into dogma to undergird the Inquisition.
You can’t know what you’re missing if you haven’t been exposed to it, and when you have, familiar habits and conveniences don’t change easily.
It takes an act of calculated volition to escape the subtle noose of conformity that American consumer culture imperceptibly tightens with every ubiquitous ploy in its considerable arsenal, with every billboard, television advertisement and sponsorship agreement that assaults our senses in a typical day.
To begin escaping it, you have to be willing to question beliefs that seem all the more sacrosanct owing to the almost religious conviction with which they are advanced.
You must try to cease thinking in terms of packaging and presentation, and begin thinking in terms of essences and ultimates, to abandon the orthodoxy that more for less is always better, and to recognize that enlightenment is far preferable to ignorance even when broader understanding brings with it "unpatriotic" and "antisocial" perceptions and connotations on the part of your peers.
This last part is the hardest part. It comes when you’ve been able to do these things, and by doing so, you find yourself utterly and irrevocably at odds with the culture of your upbringing. The past and the people who populated it retain a pull on you, but you know that you can never go back to it. It, and they, will have to come to you – or be damned.
It is unlikely that Augustine drank beer. If he did, it wasn’t beer as we know it today, but human nature is a constant that pulses throughout the long, intervening centuries. He lived in an age when certainties were being methodically stripped away as the Roman empire disintegrated into chaos, and numerous other forces competed to occupy the resulting vacuum. In the midst of societal disarray, he looked at himself and saw obvious parallels with his past, with his own aimlessness, lewdness, and overall lack of thought and misdirection, and although his memories of earlier times were in many respects remarkably balanced, seemingly to the point of nostalgia in some instances, they symbolized a life and a mode of thinking that were no longer options for him. They comprised a life he could no longer live.
His mature Christian beliefs were a framework for self-interpretation, as well as providing the foundation for his advocacy of Christian belief as the balm for troubled days in the present, and as a means of transcending the old ways collapsing all around his world.
For my money, the sociology of human beings making alcoholic beverages and drinking them, both privately and publicly, is the most complex, intimate and fascinating of all such systems that seek to explain our behavior in the context of interaction with others. All the elements are there: Religiosity, education, science, individual and group psychology … on and on, with all aspects of the human experience, the bodies and the blood, capable of being poured into a glass and consumed.
The power and intensity of the metaphor is enhanced by knowledge, and this alters your relationship with the people who are taking part, and with the elixir in the glass.
Of course, one tinkers with these fragile relationships at his own peril; once released, the genie might be reluctant to crawl meekly back into the bottle, and so it has been with me. It takes a certain hardness of heart to realize that your beliefs are beyond compromise, even if the result is a schism with the past.
I’ve come a long way toward achieving my goal of being a better beer drinker than all the rest of them – not in terms of volume, but in terms of understanding. If celebrating this accomplishment means sharing with them the detestable liquid that started us all down this path, and partaking of the liquid they still venerate, as though nothing has changed in twenty years of incessant, clamorous change, then I’ll have to regrettably pass, and urge them to come to me on my terms … or not at all.
Tour de France, or Tour de Trappiste?
Last year at this time, five friends and I were bicycling into Liege, Belgium to watch the start of the Tour de France.
Throughout last year’s Tour, the dominant motif was the number six, as in Lance Armstrong’s unprecedented sixth victory.
Six also was the magic number for our bicycling group, as we had resolved to ride a 500-mile circle around Belgium while visiting all six of the country’s Trappist monasteries that brew beer.
Sampling was not optional.
When we rode into Liege, two monastery breweries had already been visited, and four remained. After Liege came the “mountain stages,” i.e., the Ardennes – not exactly the Alps or Pyrenees, but bigger hills than we’d planned on attacking.
But we made it through, ending a week later at Westvletern in West Flanders, and with a Belgian television film crew following our progress as we completed the trek and quaffed the victorious ales.
Tour de France, or Tour de Trappiste?
Why not both?
In 2005, Lance has returned for what I hope is a seventh and final victory lap before retirement. My respect for his bicycling achievements is immense. It is well documented what he’s overcome to accomplish his athletic feats; it's simply an incredible thing to be alive much less excel in his customary manner.
I’ll be following the progress of this year's Tour de France … and remembering last year's Tour de Trappiste.
Orval or Chimay, anyone, with a Croque Monsieur and Frites?
Throughout last year’s Tour, the dominant motif was the number six, as in Lance Armstrong’s unprecedented sixth victory.
Six also was the magic number for our bicycling group, as we had resolved to ride a 500-mile circle around Belgium while visiting all six of the country’s Trappist monasteries that brew beer.
Sampling was not optional.
When we rode into Liege, two monastery breweries had already been visited, and four remained. After Liege came the “mountain stages,” i.e., the Ardennes – not exactly the Alps or Pyrenees, but bigger hills than we’d planned on attacking.
But we made it through, ending a week later at Westvletern in West Flanders, and with a Belgian television film crew following our progress as we completed the trek and quaffed the victorious ales.
Tour de France, or Tour de Trappiste?
Why not both?
In 2005, Lance has returned for what I hope is a seventh and final victory lap before retirement. My respect for his bicycling achievements is immense. It is well documented what he’s overcome to accomplish his athletic feats; it's simply an incredible thing to be alive much less excel in his customary manner.
I’ll be following the progress of this year's Tour de France … and remembering last year's Tour de Trappiste.
Orval or Chimay, anyone, with a Croque Monsieur and Frites?
Friday, July 01, 2005
Mass exodus to Birdseye; little people evacuate New Albany in search of cleanliness, lower educational standards.
Councilman Cappuccino’s provisional city government totters on the brink of dissolution today as dozens of New Albany’s littlest “little people” continue to flee the city in wee droves.
Miniature convoys of little cars, little RVs and little motorcycles, most piled high with little suitcases and little boxes, have barely been noticed streaming in the general direction of tiny Birdseye, where the doomsday Brambleberry sect’s leader, Councilman Cappuccino, vows to establish an exceedingly small government in exile.
CM Cappuccino, spotted yesterday at Big Lots buying Guatemalan tinned bologna, past-date bottles of KC Masterpiece and crates of orange Kool-Aid, blames pointy-headed book learners and ever changing cultural standards for his present political plight.
“I know all about funding the Gap,” snapped CM Cappuccino, “because that’s where my kids want to go and shop, and I tell ‘em look, Wal-Mart’s fashion line is just as good.”
According to the “little people” themselves, the imminent threat of increased prosperity and higher property values as New Albany’s revitalization proceeds are their primary reasons for seeking asylum in bucolic Birdseye.
Others point to the Village People’s 70’s-era hit song “YMCA” as a prophetic and almost Biblical warning -- albeit without divine sanction -- against allowing the Scribner Place project to go through.
“We are the little people,” sputtered one refugee yesterday as he relieved himself behind a blade of grass along the highway median, “and we will be heard!”
Miniature convoys of little cars, little RVs and little motorcycles, most piled high with little suitcases and little boxes, have barely been noticed streaming in the general direction of tiny Birdseye, where the doomsday Brambleberry sect’s leader, Councilman Cappuccino, vows to establish an exceedingly small government in exile.
CM Cappuccino, spotted yesterday at Big Lots buying Guatemalan tinned bologna, past-date bottles of KC Masterpiece and crates of orange Kool-Aid, blames pointy-headed book learners and ever changing cultural standards for his present political plight.
“I know all about funding the Gap,” snapped CM Cappuccino, “because that’s where my kids want to go and shop, and I tell ‘em look, Wal-Mart’s fashion line is just as good.”
According to the “little people” themselves, the imminent threat of increased prosperity and higher property values as New Albany’s revitalization proceeds are their primary reasons for seeking asylum in bucolic Birdseye.
Others point to the Village People’s 70’s-era hit song “YMCA” as a prophetic and almost Biblical warning -- albeit without divine sanction -- against allowing the Scribner Place project to go through.
“We are the little people,” sputtered one refugee yesterday as he relieved himself behind a blade of grass along the highway median, “and we will be heard!”
Thursday, June 30, 2005
The case for re-opening Locust Street.
Frequent reader and New Albany resident Jerry Steuerwald contributed the following comment, which argues in favor of the city of New Albany re-opening Locust Street to traffic.
This consideration was the main agenda item at Wednesday's Board of Public Works and Safety meeting. The board postponed a final decision until its regularly scheduled meeting on Tuesday, July 12.
In essence, the school system's position is that as the campuses of New Albany High School and Hazelwood Middle School have been augmented and enlarged, the potential threat to the safety of students from intemperate drivers on a reopened Locust Street has grown to the point that the street must remain shut.
At the most recent Public Works hearing, several speakers proposed compromise solutions to help regulate traffic during the more crowded afternoon hours when school lets out.
Viewpoints, anyone?
See also Residents sound off on Locust Street reopening, by Amany Ali, Tribune City Editor. Jerry's column also was posted in today's Volunteer Hoosier.
Liberate Locust Street
By J.R. Steuerwald.
During the past few years, since Locust Street has been closed due to construction at Hazelwood Middle School, residents residing around Locust Street have seen traffic on our residential streets escalate.
Locust Street was designed by city planners to handle traffic wishing to travel between Vincennes and Silver Streets. Locust Street consists of two schools, two parking areas, tennis courts and the football stadium, none of which are occupied continually throughout the day.
Residents living around Locust Street live at and use their properties 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They should be able to have safe access to their homes and be able to allow their children to play on their property without having to be concerned about increased traffic flow and excessive speeds from drivers using their streets in the attempt to connect between Vincennes and Silver Streets.
Representatives of the school system at the June 29th Board of Public Works and Safety meeting for the City of New Albany would have you believe that their insistence on closing Locust Street is for the “sake of the children” and their safety.
I personally couldn’t agree more, but whose children are we talking about anyway? Many of the kids they claim to be interested in protecting come from the very same streets whose residents (131 of whom signed a petition) seek to have Locust Street re-opened.
The issue of whether or not Locust Street should be re-opened is more complex than our school children’s safety. No one on either side wants anybody put in an unsafe position, whether they reside on Locust Street or any other street in the area. No! This issue is bigger than that. Both the school system and the surrounding neighborhoods can peacefully co-exist if the traffic is managed during peak school hours.
I’ve lived in larger cities that change the traffic flow of major streets daily depending on the traffic needs. Locust Street doesn’t need to be closed to city residents who pay taxes to support New Albany schools, just because our city’s “leaders” can’t find a reasonable solution to this problem —manage the traffic during peak school hours and open the street to city residents!
I wait with anticipation to see how the Board of Public Works and Safety decides on July 12.
This consideration was the main agenda item at Wednesday's Board of Public Works and Safety meeting. The board postponed a final decision until its regularly scheduled meeting on Tuesday, July 12.
In essence, the school system's position is that as the campuses of New Albany High School and Hazelwood Middle School have been augmented and enlarged, the potential threat to the safety of students from intemperate drivers on a reopened Locust Street has grown to the point that the street must remain shut.
At the most recent Public Works hearing, several speakers proposed compromise solutions to help regulate traffic during the more crowded afternoon hours when school lets out.
Viewpoints, anyone?
See also Residents sound off on Locust Street reopening, by Amany Ali, Tribune City Editor. Jerry's column also was posted in today's Volunteer Hoosier.
Liberate Locust Street
By J.R. Steuerwald.
During the past few years, since Locust Street has been closed due to construction at Hazelwood Middle School, residents residing around Locust Street have seen traffic on our residential streets escalate.
Locust Street was designed by city planners to handle traffic wishing to travel between Vincennes and Silver Streets. Locust Street consists of two schools, two parking areas, tennis courts and the football stadium, none of which are occupied continually throughout the day.
Residents living around Locust Street live at and use their properties 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They should be able to have safe access to their homes and be able to allow their children to play on their property without having to be concerned about increased traffic flow and excessive speeds from drivers using their streets in the attempt to connect between Vincennes and Silver Streets.
Representatives of the school system at the June 29th Board of Public Works and Safety meeting for the City of New Albany would have you believe that their insistence on closing Locust Street is for the “sake of the children” and their safety.
I personally couldn’t agree more, but whose children are we talking about anyway? Many of the kids they claim to be interested in protecting come from the very same streets whose residents (131 of whom signed a petition) seek to have Locust Street re-opened.
The issue of whether or not Locust Street should be re-opened is more complex than our school children’s safety. No one on either side wants anybody put in an unsafe position, whether they reside on Locust Street or any other street in the area. No! This issue is bigger than that. Both the school system and the surrounding neighborhoods can peacefully co-exist if the traffic is managed during peak school hours.
I’ve lived in larger cities that change the traffic flow of major streets daily depending on the traffic needs. Locust Street doesn’t need to be closed to city residents who pay taxes to support New Albany schools, just because our city’s “leaders” can’t find a reasonable solution to this problem —manage the traffic during peak school hours and open the street to city residents!
I wait with anticipation to see how the Board of Public Works and Safety decides on July 12.
3rd District's Price AWOL as Board of Public Works & Safety and ESSNA come together at the Calumet Club.
In testimony before the Board of Public Works and Safety, which gathered Wednesday in a special evening session at the Calumet Club, numerous citizens spoke to the board, and the following was established beyond reasonable doubt:
They foul the streets and alleys with refuse.
They let their pets run rampant.
They drive too fast/recklessly/loudly/badly.
They don’t control their teenagers.
They refuse to maintain their property properly.
They sell, use and advocate drugs.
They are slumlords and just don’t care.
Perhaps Pogo was right, after all.
So, Tony, Steve and Chas -- you thought it would be easy serving on the Board of Public Works and Safety?
It was known well in advance that the most pressing issue on the agenda would be the future status of a section of Locust Street by New Albany High School and Hazelwood Middle School.
This part of Locust has remained closed during long years of seemingly endless school construction, and residents of Depauw Avenue and surrounding streets have grown correspondingly weary of heavy traffic through their neighborhoods.
The New Albany-Floyd County Schools insisted that having been given approval to extend their campuses in, around and over Locust, a resumption of traffic would pose a safety threat to the students, primarily during the afternoon when classes let out.
Faced with a crowd eager for a decision, and a Gordian street problem fairly begging for some variety of compromise, the three-member board chose the most rational solution – tabling the measure until July 12, and hopefully allowing time for the tripartite crystal ball to conjure a suggestion or three.
As is customary during the board’s regular Tuesday morning meetings, a wide range of issues were raised and discussed, with the city’s department heads present to take notes and be consulted about those questions falling within their jurisdiction.
A sampling:
Q. When will a bridge on Jolissant and a guardrail on Old Ford be prepared?
A. After it is determined whether the drivers who damaged them have insurance. If not, work proceeds and the driver(s) will be sued.
Q. Is it fair to issue citations for blocking the street sweeper when the streets aren’t being cleaned according to the regular schedule owing to equipment shortages?
A. The law is the law, irrespective.
Q. Should you get a busy signal when calling 9-1-1?
A. No, absolutely not. Police Chief Harl will investigate.
Q. Will the road up Spring Street hill be reopened?
A. Yes, if we can find the money necessary to make repairs the right way.
In addition to the department heads, four of the city’s nine city council representatives attended the public works meeting: Councilmen Blevins, Messer, Kochert and Schmidt.
Councilman Schmidt, who is a regular visitor to works board meetings, seized the occasion of reporting tall weeds at a site in his district to publicly “clear up something I’ve been blamed for,” which was erroneous information “in the paper and so forth” to the effect that he alone stood in the way of he council finalizing ordinance enforcement.
“The Mayor said ‘hold it,’ not us,” said Schmidt, who attributed the delay to waiting for financial signals from the state, then firmly added “I’m not the problem,” although he declined to identify the source of the report to which he referred, leaving most listeners confused but respectful.
3rd District Councilman Steve Price was unavailable for comment, having concluded that the first special night public works board meeting in recent memory, if ever, did not merit his attention and attendance in spite of it being held in his own district and hosted by the East Spring Street Neighborhood Association, one of the city’s most active proponents of community betterment .
Anyone noticing a pattern here?
Perhaps the absent Councilman Price can provide New Albany Confidential with a concert review of the Bob Dylan/Willie Nelson show, held tonight at Louisville Slugger Field, which CM Price also might wish to contemplate as municipal infrastructure investment carried forward by future-thinking visionaries despite the potential threats of nuclear holocaust, shark attack and gangsta rap.
They foul the streets and alleys with refuse.
They let their pets run rampant.
They drive too fast/recklessly/loudly/badly.
They don’t control their teenagers.
They refuse to maintain their property properly.
They sell, use and advocate drugs.
They are slumlords and just don’t care.
Perhaps Pogo was right, after all.
So, Tony, Steve and Chas -- you thought it would be easy serving on the Board of Public Works and Safety?
It was known well in advance that the most pressing issue on the agenda would be the future status of a section of Locust Street by New Albany High School and Hazelwood Middle School.
This part of Locust has remained closed during long years of seemingly endless school construction, and residents of Depauw Avenue and surrounding streets have grown correspondingly weary of heavy traffic through their neighborhoods.
The New Albany-Floyd County Schools insisted that having been given approval to extend their campuses in, around and over Locust, a resumption of traffic would pose a safety threat to the students, primarily during the afternoon when classes let out.
Faced with a crowd eager for a decision, and a Gordian street problem fairly begging for some variety of compromise, the three-member board chose the most rational solution – tabling the measure until July 12, and hopefully allowing time for the tripartite crystal ball to conjure a suggestion or three.
As is customary during the board’s regular Tuesday morning meetings, a wide range of issues were raised and discussed, with the city’s department heads present to take notes and be consulted about those questions falling within their jurisdiction.
A sampling:
Q. When will a bridge on Jolissant and a guardrail on Old Ford be prepared?
A. After it is determined whether the drivers who damaged them have insurance. If not, work proceeds and the driver(s) will be sued.
Q. Is it fair to issue citations for blocking the street sweeper when the streets aren’t being cleaned according to the regular schedule owing to equipment shortages?
A. The law is the law, irrespective.
Q. Should you get a busy signal when calling 9-1-1?
A. No, absolutely not. Police Chief Harl will investigate.
Q. Will the road up Spring Street hill be reopened?
A. Yes, if we can find the money necessary to make repairs the right way.
In addition to the department heads, four of the city’s nine city council representatives attended the public works meeting: Councilmen Blevins, Messer, Kochert and Schmidt.
Councilman Schmidt, who is a regular visitor to works board meetings, seized the occasion of reporting tall weeds at a site in his district to publicly “clear up something I’ve been blamed for,” which was erroneous information “in the paper and so forth” to the effect that he alone stood in the way of he council finalizing ordinance enforcement.
“The Mayor said ‘hold it,’ not us,” said Schmidt, who attributed the delay to waiting for financial signals from the state, then firmly added “I’m not the problem,” although he declined to identify the source of the report to which he referred, leaving most listeners confused but respectful.
3rd District Councilman Steve Price was unavailable for comment, having concluded that the first special night public works board meeting in recent memory, if ever, did not merit his attention and attendance in spite of it being held in his own district and hosted by the East Spring Street Neighborhood Association, one of the city’s most active proponents of community betterment .
Anyone noticing a pattern here?
Perhaps the absent Councilman Price can provide New Albany Confidential with a concert review of the Bob Dylan/Willie Nelson show, held tonight at Louisville Slugger Field, which CM Price also might wish to contemplate as municipal infrastructure investment carried forward by future-thinking visionaries despite the potential threats of nuclear holocaust, shark attack and gangsta rap.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
More work session thoughts from Tuesday night, June 28.
Random notes from last evening’s City Council work session:
It was encouraging to see representation from the Floyd County Council and Board of Commissioners.
Here's one conceivable scenario: At the July 7 City Council meeting, the chosen Scribner Place bonding/financing proposal (the third, sans property tax back-up?) is passed on a first reading. On Tuesday, July 12, the County Council confirms the indication of support from the Commissioners, permitting the second and third readings at the City Council meetings on Thursday, July 21.
The vote for the second and third readings is 6-3, with Councilmen Dan Coffey, Bill Schmidt and Steve Price nay-saying, and shedding the confederacy of Larry Kochert, who is honor-bound to support Scribner Place if the county comes on board.
Or not; who knows? And, what's the county's price for co-operation?
The Coffey Plan?
DOA.
It was discouraging to hear Councilmen Coffey and Kochert ask questions of the YMCA’s ever dignified Joe LaRocca in somewhat dismissive tones of voice, as though to suggest that Mr. LaRocca hasn’t done his homework on matters like projected membership fees, and is somehow intent on foisting a YMCA on New Albany that none except the culturally suspect will ever use.
----
Funny how the Scribner Place project’s most persistent critics occupy and abandon "principled" positions with remarkable dexterity, yet always return to unsubtle and occasionally downright bizarre hints that the YMCA’s clientele will not be representative of New Albany's populace.
Nothing whatsoever is said about the potential position of social services in general, and LifeSpan Resources in particular, in the plan for the YMCA facility.
----
To the vast majority of human observers, the world is a dauntingly complex place. Fortunately, New Albany has 1st District Councilman Coffey to publicly elucidate the principles of benign simplicity.
Thus, while many of us look to towns of similar size and history like Columbus and Madison to serve as models for progress, the Wizard of Westside sets his gaze on simpler and better examples of cleanliness and organization.
“New Albany can be like Birdseye,” he said last evening, as an astonished crowd listened and asked, just exactly where is Birdseye?
And why would a council member compare Birdseye to a city of 40,000 residents?
----
Speaking of off-kilter relationships, if you can somehow picture Bo or Luke Duke as councilperson for Brookline, Massachusetts or Boulder, Colorado, then it’s easier to come to grips with the growing disconnect between incumbent Steve Price and the 3rd District, which he purports to represent.
Councilman Price, who remains the only council member to go on record as opposing Scribner Place under any circumstances (see UPDATED: Scribner Place: Who's for it, who's against it, and who hasn't decided) in spite of widespread support for the project within his council district, expended precious few breaths during the council’s work session, but the comments he did make were devoted to further shaping his emerging No Price for Any Progress Doctrine.
The future’s coming, twanged Councilman Price last night. Health care costs are going to keep rising, and costs will go up, and lightning might strike, so who are we to try and do anything now, when hunkering down might save us from ourselves 10, 15 or even 50 years down the road?
He's an embarrassment -- but he's our embarrassment.
----
Councilman Price is said to be a rabid fan of Seventies rock and roll, and his unfortunate constituents hopefully “Won’t Get Fooled Again” come election time in 2007.
Meanwhile, I prefer newer tunes, like “Move On,” by the Australian rock band Jet:
Well, I’ve been thinking about the future
I’m too young to pretend
It’s such a waste to always look behind you
You should be looking straight ahead
It was encouraging to see representation from the Floyd County Council and Board of Commissioners.
Here's one conceivable scenario: At the July 7 City Council meeting, the chosen Scribner Place bonding/financing proposal (the third, sans property tax back-up?) is passed on a first reading. On Tuesday, July 12, the County Council confirms the indication of support from the Commissioners, permitting the second and third readings at the City Council meetings on Thursday, July 21.
The vote for the second and third readings is 6-3, with Councilmen Dan Coffey, Bill Schmidt and Steve Price nay-saying, and shedding the confederacy of Larry Kochert, who is honor-bound to support Scribner Place if the county comes on board.
Or not; who knows? And, what's the county's price for co-operation?
The Coffey Plan?
DOA.
It was discouraging to hear Councilmen Coffey and Kochert ask questions of the YMCA’s ever dignified Joe LaRocca in somewhat dismissive tones of voice, as though to suggest that Mr. LaRocca hasn’t done his homework on matters like projected membership fees, and is somehow intent on foisting a YMCA on New Albany that none except the culturally suspect will ever use.
----
Funny how the Scribner Place project’s most persistent critics occupy and abandon "principled" positions with remarkable dexterity, yet always return to unsubtle and occasionally downright bizarre hints that the YMCA’s clientele will not be representative of New Albany's populace.
Nothing whatsoever is said about the potential position of social services in general, and LifeSpan Resources in particular, in the plan for the YMCA facility.
----
To the vast majority of human observers, the world is a dauntingly complex place. Fortunately, New Albany has 1st District Councilman Coffey to publicly elucidate the principles of benign simplicity.
Thus, while many of us look to towns of similar size and history like Columbus and Madison to serve as models for progress, the Wizard of Westside sets his gaze on simpler and better examples of cleanliness and organization.
“New Albany can be like Birdseye,” he said last evening, as an astonished crowd listened and asked, just exactly where is Birdseye?
And why would a council member compare Birdseye to a city of 40,000 residents?
----
Speaking of off-kilter relationships, if you can somehow picture Bo or Luke Duke as councilperson for Brookline, Massachusetts or Boulder, Colorado, then it’s easier to come to grips with the growing disconnect between incumbent Steve Price and the 3rd District, which he purports to represent.
Councilman Price, who remains the only council member to go on record as opposing Scribner Place under any circumstances (see UPDATED: Scribner Place: Who's for it, who's against it, and who hasn't decided) in spite of widespread support for the project within his council district, expended precious few breaths during the council’s work session, but the comments he did make were devoted to further shaping his emerging No Price for Any Progress Doctrine.
The future’s coming, twanged Councilman Price last night. Health care costs are going to keep rising, and costs will go up, and lightning might strike, so who are we to try and do anything now, when hunkering down might save us from ourselves 10, 15 or even 50 years down the road?
He's an embarrassment -- but he's our embarrassment.
----
Councilman Price is said to be a rabid fan of Seventies rock and roll, and his unfortunate constituents hopefully “Won’t Get Fooled Again” come election time in 2007.
Meanwhile, I prefer newer tunes, like “Move On,” by the Australian rock band Jet:
Well, I’ve been thinking about the future
I’m too young to pretend
It’s such a waste to always look behind you
You should be looking straight ahead
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
UPDATED: Councilman Dan Coffey on Scribner Place: “It’s gonna happen. It has to happen.”
Tuesday evening’s City Council work session, a gathering designed to share information with no votes proposed or taken, wasn’t two minutes old when 1st District Councilman Dan Coffey stepped to the plate, waving his bat menacingly, spitting on his hands, and pointing to the exact spot in deepest right center field (i.e., the water fountain in the corridor) where he proposed to plant the fat pitch coming his way.
But what followed could hardly be termed a mighty cut.
In fact, it was more like a tentative checked swing, producing a weak little dribbler to the mound – and when Coffey’s time at bat was mercifully concluded, and he returned to the dugout to punch the water cooler, the fans in the stand sighed and said yes, he deserved his chance to bat – now maybe we’ll score some runs.
Just as the sum of a half dozen zeroes is still zero, so the impact of the Coffey Plan, as presented by the councilman to an audience precluded by accepted protocol from speaking, and illustrated with poster board, magic marker and hastily assembled snapshots of dilapidated houses and potholed streets, was no more than that of a balefully muted fart at a rock and roll show.
Of course, the primary consideration of the Coffey Plan is that the proper name “Coffey” is affixed right where the councilman thinks it should be, in front of that other part, but the curious motif of Councilman Coffey’s typically egocentric performance on Tuesday night was an almost desperate appeal to arcane legalism – not the breathtaking, soaring flights of sheer semi-literate nonsense that so often characterizes his pseudo-professorial pronouncements on matters ranging from advanced hydroponics to the sexual habits of equatorial hedgehogs.
Amid the clutter of unrelated clauses, Councilman Coffey seemed to emphasize three main points.
1. The YMCA should remove the burden of Scribner Place from New Albany, since the city is far too factionalized by the Gang of Four’s obstructionist tactics to know how to use it, and then the city should take the money it saves by privatizing Scribner Place and use it to repair streets, sewers and other things that have remained stubbornly broken throughout Councilman Coffey’s long tenure on the City Council.
2. It is vitally important to realize that there might be any number of financing plans yet to be conceived over cigarettes and Captain Crunch, and we mustn’t forget this potential plethora of plans, even if it means a plan other than the Coffey Plan is adopted as the plan of record.
3. Just as Bill Clinton before him, Councilman Coffey will have you know that he has read the fine print of the Caesar’s Foundation grant agreement, and two years and forty pages later, it is crystal clear about the meaning of “is,” although “it doesn’t say ‘and,’ it says ‘or.’” This is crucial, and means that the city is free to sell its piece of the action to anyone foolish enough to accept the offer.
As a tactical rearguard action, the Coffey Plan remains a confused muddle of disparate components that cynically tosses a sliver of red meat to the clamoring “concern” yokels in the form of the aforementioned string of nulls, but has all the weight of a flea’s handkerchief when it comes to his chances of influencing the decision-making process with respect to Scribner Place, the lumbering machinery of which already is well removed from Councilman Coffey’s sweaty and perpetually conniving palms.
This leaves a modicum of obligatory strategic posturing for the next election, and a few stickpins in the household bulletin board for saying “I told you so” if alien spaceships elect to vaporize the YMCA a quarter-century from now.
That’s about it. It wasn’t at all clear whether he believed any of it himself.
By the work session’s end, Councilman Coffey was reduced to complaining about the condition of city streets, noting “I’ve still got a broken front end of my truck because of a hole in the road,” and smiling wanly as City Hall looked in his direction and thanked the council for helping them work things out.
By then, almost no one was listening.
-----
In Wednesday morning coverage, the Courier-Journal correctly focuses attention on signals that county support for Scribner Place is on the way, relegating Councilman Coffey's tiresome bid to be seen as the contemporary Henry Clay to a paragraph near the bottom.
Floyd warming to Scribner Place; County officials join city meeting on plan, by Ben Zion Hershberg of the Courier-Journal (short shelf life for C-J links).
But what followed could hardly be termed a mighty cut.
In fact, it was more like a tentative checked swing, producing a weak little dribbler to the mound – and when Coffey’s time at bat was mercifully concluded, and he returned to the dugout to punch the water cooler, the fans in the stand sighed and said yes, he deserved his chance to bat – now maybe we’ll score some runs.
Just as the sum of a half dozen zeroes is still zero, so the impact of the Coffey Plan, as presented by the councilman to an audience precluded by accepted protocol from speaking, and illustrated with poster board, magic marker and hastily assembled snapshots of dilapidated houses and potholed streets, was no more than that of a balefully muted fart at a rock and roll show.
Of course, the primary consideration of the Coffey Plan is that the proper name “Coffey” is affixed right where the councilman thinks it should be, in front of that other part, but the curious motif of Councilman Coffey’s typically egocentric performance on Tuesday night was an almost desperate appeal to arcane legalism – not the breathtaking, soaring flights of sheer semi-literate nonsense that so often characterizes his pseudo-professorial pronouncements on matters ranging from advanced hydroponics to the sexual habits of equatorial hedgehogs.
Amid the clutter of unrelated clauses, Councilman Coffey seemed to emphasize three main points.
1. The YMCA should remove the burden of Scribner Place from New Albany, since the city is far too factionalized by the Gang of Four’s obstructionist tactics to know how to use it, and then the city should take the money it saves by privatizing Scribner Place and use it to repair streets, sewers and other things that have remained stubbornly broken throughout Councilman Coffey’s long tenure on the City Council.
2. It is vitally important to realize that there might be any number of financing plans yet to be conceived over cigarettes and Captain Crunch, and we mustn’t forget this potential plethora of plans, even if it means a plan other than the Coffey Plan is adopted as the plan of record.
3. Just as Bill Clinton before him, Councilman Coffey will have you know that he has read the fine print of the Caesar’s Foundation grant agreement, and two years and forty pages later, it is crystal clear about the meaning of “is,” although “it doesn’t say ‘and,’ it says ‘or.’” This is crucial, and means that the city is free to sell its piece of the action to anyone foolish enough to accept the offer.
As a tactical rearguard action, the Coffey Plan remains a confused muddle of disparate components that cynically tosses a sliver of red meat to the clamoring “concern” yokels in the form of the aforementioned string of nulls, but has all the weight of a flea’s handkerchief when it comes to his chances of influencing the decision-making process with respect to Scribner Place, the lumbering machinery of which already is well removed from Councilman Coffey’s sweaty and perpetually conniving palms.
This leaves a modicum of obligatory strategic posturing for the next election, and a few stickpins in the household bulletin board for saying “I told you so” if alien spaceships elect to vaporize the YMCA a quarter-century from now.
That’s about it. It wasn’t at all clear whether he believed any of it himself.
By the work session’s end, Councilman Coffey was reduced to complaining about the condition of city streets, noting “I’ve still got a broken front end of my truck because of a hole in the road,” and smiling wanly as City Hall looked in his direction and thanked the council for helping them work things out.
By then, almost no one was listening.
-----
In Wednesday morning coverage, the Courier-Journal correctly focuses attention on signals that county support for Scribner Place is on the way, relegating Councilman Coffey's tiresome bid to be seen as the contemporary Henry Clay to a paragraph near the bottom.
Floyd warming to Scribner Place; County officials join city meeting on plan, by Ben Zion Hershberg of the Courier-Journal (short shelf life for C-J links).
Monday, June 27, 2005
The Tribune wants to know what you think about Scribner Place.
In Friday’s Tribune, Managing Editor Chris Morris asks the newspaper’s readers to let him know what they think about the Scribner Place project.
He promises to anthologize responses on the editorial page, and closes with a commendably sly fait accompli: “Scribner Place is a huge part of our downtown’s future, and we want to know what you think.”
As a regular reader of NA Confidential, you really should drop Chris a line and provide him with your viewpoint on the issues surrounding the Scribner Place project.
You should do so even if your stance differs from mine.
Whether you agree or disagree, I’m confident that NAC’s regular readership will approach this hotly debated topic with confidence, literacy, style and a good command of the material.
Most of you embrace a progressive, future-oriented perspective, and the very existence of such a readership in a city so often denigrated as backward even by its own obstructionist citizenry helps to illustrate the point that there is hope for New Albany if only we learn to live and work more intelligently.
Emphatically, the word “intelligently” in this sense is not meant to imply heightened IQ, excessive book learning, incessant pointy-headedness or any other of the populist’s bugaboos.
Rather, the word refers to what we trust will be a new beginning in the life and times of New Albany, one that looks forward, not behind.
The Scribner Place project itself symbolizes a willingness, albeit sometimes tentative and uncertain, to harness the resources of New Albany as intelligently as possible so as to provide a destination that will spur investment in the city’s moribund downtown district, and accordingly, to provide benefits to all the city’s residents, not just the few.
That’s why we support Scribner Place.
Either way, please write Chris and let him know what you think. His e-mail address is crmorris@news-tribune.net.
He promises to anthologize responses on the editorial page, and closes with a commendably sly fait accompli: “Scribner Place is a huge part of our downtown’s future, and we want to know what you think.”
As a regular reader of NA Confidential, you really should drop Chris a line and provide him with your viewpoint on the issues surrounding the Scribner Place project.
You should do so even if your stance differs from mine.
Whether you agree or disagree, I’m confident that NAC’s regular readership will approach this hotly debated topic with confidence, literacy, style and a good command of the material.
Most of you embrace a progressive, future-oriented perspective, and the very existence of such a readership in a city so often denigrated as backward even by its own obstructionist citizenry helps to illustrate the point that there is hope for New Albany if only we learn to live and work more intelligently.
Emphatically, the word “intelligently” in this sense is not meant to imply heightened IQ, excessive book learning, incessant pointy-headedness or any other of the populist’s bugaboos.
Rather, the word refers to what we trust will be a new beginning in the life and times of New Albany, one that looks forward, not behind.
The Scribner Place project itself symbolizes a willingness, albeit sometimes tentative and uncertain, to harness the resources of New Albany as intelligently as possible so as to provide a destination that will spur investment in the city’s moribund downtown district, and accordingly, to provide benefits to all the city’s residents, not just the few.
That’s why we support Scribner Place.
Either way, please write Chris and let him know what you think. His e-mail address is crmorris@news-tribune.net.
Get organized: ESSNA in the morning C-J; prime time Public Works meeting on Wednesday night.
“Welcome to the camp – I guess you all know why we’re here.”
Pete Townshend, from “Tommy”
NA Confidential is dedicated to the proposition that our place of residence matters, and contrary to the traditional prejudice inexplicably accepted by so many nay-saying city residents, that we are in fact capable of great things in this place.
In Monday’s Courier-Journal, Christopher Hall joins the East Spring Street Neighborhood Association as its volunteers devote a steamy Sunday to distributing information and brochures to area residents: New Albany group pushes improvements (short shelf life on most C-J links).
The urgency of forthcoming City Council votes on funding for the Scribner Place project inevitably has shifted focus away from the imperative of ordinance enforcement, which has been dangling in the pathless limbo of the council’s “awaiting action” box for some months.
Pete Townshend, from “Tommy”
NA Confidential is dedicated to the proposition that our place of residence matters, and contrary to the traditional prejudice inexplicably accepted by so many nay-saying city residents, that we are in fact capable of great things in this place.
In Monday’s Courier-Journal, Christopher Hall joins the East Spring Street Neighborhood Association as its volunteers devote a steamy Sunday to distributing information and brochures to area residents: New Albany group pushes improvements (short shelf life on most C-J links).
The urgency of forthcoming City Council votes on funding for the Scribner Place project inevitably has shifted focus away from the imperative of ordinance enforcement, which has been dangling in the pathless limbo of the council’s “awaiting action” box for some months.
See What does Bill Schmidt have against ordinance enforcement at Volunteer Hoosier, and Amany Ali's Tribune article last week that will be linked here when at long last it appears on the newspaper's web site).
As ESSNA president Greg Roberts makes very clear in Hall’s report, ordinance enforcement may have been deferred, but it has not been forgotten, and remains perhaps the one topic that united New Albanians of differing political, cultural and social milieus, with the possible exceptions of the parasitic slumlord class, whose properties would be the immediate targets of vigorous ordinance enforcement.
Don’t forget that on Wednesday night, June 29, the ESSNA will host an evening meeting for the Board of Public Works and Safety.
The meeting will take place at the Calumet Club, 1614 East Spring Street, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
This special prime-time meeting, which is open to the public, is the place to bring concerns, problems and complaints that run the gamut from stray dogs to crack houses, and the board couldn’t have chosen a more comfortable forum.
Previously in NA Confidential:
To Ms. Oates: You are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.
Regular readers will recall NA Confidential’s running dialogue with fellow New Albanian citizen Laura Oates, who recently was appointed to the J. Goebbels Chair of Public Policy Debate at Bazooka Joe University in Oz.
Touchingly concerned that differing opinions might disturb the bucolic equilibrium of the civic-minded “squeeze cooperation out of my cold, dead hands, pointy head” denizens frequenting her blog -- a forum laughably purporting to espouse free speech so long as it doesn’t nudge past the Tribune’s editorial standards in reading comprehension or embrace a viewpoint that doesn’t jibe with the gospel according to anonymous “little people” (their choice of identity, not ours) -- Ms. Oates also recently banned NA Confidential and “Bluegill” from sullying the corridors of her daily exercise in anti-intellectual mob empowerment.
Consequently, when she and her bedazzled fans make preposterous claims and subject the reading community to the tender crayon mercies of Luddite logic (2 + 2 = whatever I feel like -- today), there is no way to respond or to further the discussion without expending precious bandwidth here at NAC.
And this we’re prepared to do yet again, at least until the “little people” decide to take the unprecedented step of reading an American history book and considering the inconvenient topic of censorship – something apparently not broached in Sociology 101.
Today at Speak Out, Lout (NA), Ms. Oates asks:
LO:
Infrastructure or swimming pools? The City Council has planned another “workshop” session on the Scribner Place project that will be held Tuesday night, June 28th, at 6:30PM on the 3rd floor. However, no public comments or questions will be allowed. Great way to get some support back under this thing, don’t let anybody ask questions and don’t listen to anybody’s opinion.
NAC:
Currently there are more opinions about Scribner Place than there were cicadas last summer.
It has been at least three years since Regina Overton introduced the plan. How much time is necessary for the “little people” to become familiar with it and to formulate an opinion? Haven’t most done so already? Ms. Oates’ blog is all agog with the graffiti of anti-Scribner Place “concern taxpayers” and “new albany residents,” many of which have attended city council meetings regularly for years.
Did they not catch occasional references to Scribner Place in all that time? Haven’t they spoken against it during the public communications segment? Aren’t they taking turns frightening their “little” friends by creating vast conspiracies, and then fawning over knights in aluminum armor like Dan Coffey, who will deliver them from the future?
LO:
But, why should we be surprised? This thing is going to happen one way or another, and those who don’t like it better just shut up and keep their opinions to themselves. Most are just plain too stupid to know what’s good for them anyway. Right Baylor?
NAC:
On several occasions lately, Ms. Oates actually has reminded her readers that Scribner Place is inevitable, with only the manner of funding remaining to be shaped by public participation, which she obviously hopes to influence, or would not be blogging in the manner she has. So, it’s fairly obvious that no one is asking the community’s troglodytes to shut up.
Rather, we’re asking them to make sense. With respect to opinions, NA Confidential has advocated a consistent policy throughout its existence:
You are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts. *
Laura consistently has confused the two – opinion and fact -- during her stewardship of the “little people’s” blog, often indulging in the ham-fisted and non-discerning censorship of facts and factual discussions, while promoting flatulence as fact, and maintaining in a yet-to-be-determined fashion that the more downtrodden one is, the less that rules of civilized discourse and etiquette apply.
They’ll turn on you, Ms. Oates. Anyone seen our old chum Robespierre lately?
By the way, you’ll notice that consistently throughout the history of our debates, NA Confidential has referred to Laura Oates as “Laura” or “Ms. Oates,” opting for the more formal usage today because of her increasingly strident and intemperate treatment of my own given name.
LO:
Real smarts would tell you that since it's the ONLY plan, well then it must be a good plan.
NAC:
After much deliberation, we choose to regard this sentence as intended in the satirical sense. Since it fails satirically, might it be regarded as a miscarriage of rhetoric?
Might this handy designation be extended to the whole of Speak Out, Lout (NA)?
LO:
We have all been witness to the rantings of the insolents who support the proposed city investment into the YMCA-Scribner Place project, and we are all well aware of the nasty, rude remarks they have hurled at those who do not support their point of view. Rather than discussing the issue with some measure of decorum, they resort to name calling, insults on intelligence, and accusations of political agendas.
NAC:
Insolent? Who’s telling whom to shut up?
Time and time again, the “little people” have used Ms. Oates’ forum to vociferously demand the “agenda” of NA Confidential, Volunteer Hoosier and other progressive advocates in the city, and these entities have responded in essence that their agenda is progress, plain and simple.
Some of you are aware that when our friend Bluegill carefully and methodically responded to the opinions on Ms. Oates’ blog, and did so factually and utterly without “nasty” or “rude” hyperbole, his reward for doing so was being asked to leave, as his thoughts were deemed just too long-winded for the opinionated “little people” to be expected to digest.
It’d be like a person stepping into the cockpit of a plane and demanding to fly it, not because he has any factual proof that he knows how to fly an airplane (license, documentation, training), but because he “believes” he can do it (his opinion), and when you offer to teach him, he won’t listen because that’d take too long – and he’s in a great rush to go nowhere in particular.
LO:
The folks who do not agree with the city’s involvement in the project have been accused of an attitude of “no progress at any price”. I assert it is quite the contrary. The pro-spending crowd doesn’t seem to hear the pleas to invest in improvements and repairs to the inner city rather than plunking down huge amounts of money and resources into a venture that could potentially fail. Now, before anybody starts jumping up and down on that statement let me clarify. I personally would love to see a development such as the YMCA come to town, and I truly hope it will be successful. I am not against the YMCA development.
NAC:
Advocates of progress take the view that public financing should be utilized in order to do as much as possible with the resources we have at hand, whether by low-risk expenditures in infrastructure development that will help broaden the tax base and revitalize downtown, bringing needed jobs to the city and priming the pump for further growth, or by continuing the work of repairing and improving the existing infrastructure. There is no reason why these two strategies cannot be pursued at the same time – other than a lack of will and the inherent defeatism of a minority of the city’s citizenry.
LO:
However, I do not believe that New Albany city government is in any position to be involved in the commercial end of this endeavor. Particularly when there are so many problems with our infrastructure, and a desperate need for code enforcement, along with many other issues that affect quality of life here. Speaking of code enforcement, since the Council passed the approval of the position and salary, we have made no apparent progress towards implementing the job. Are we still getting one? Or are we being told there’s no money?
NAC:
There is no disagreement with respect to ordinance enforcement, although NA Confidential would like to see its scope broadened beyond the bare minimum proposed earlier this year.
LO: As for the Coffey Plan, I’m not so sure his plan would back this thing up all the way to zero’s. The city has already purchased land, and is in process of clearance and environmental cleanup. I believe that is a $1.5 million cost that has already been undertaken. The city plans to lease the cleared and cleaned land to the YMCA for $1 per year. One hell of a deal that would help any business get off to a good start (any hint of how to spawn more businesses?).
NAC:
Entrepreneurs spawn businesses. They do so by taking stock of the requirements necessary for their chosen field of expertise, and then seeking to utilize those factors in a business plan. Cities everywhere attempt to influence entrepreneurs by establishing favorable conditions for business operation, which today involves more than tax abatements and giveaways. It involves making a city a place where the workers of the future want to live, and if the workers of the future live in a city, the jobs created by entrepreneurs will in part come to the city because the workers' skills and outlook are the valued commodities in today’s economy.
Quite simply, the YMCA’s target demographic is roundly and loudly detested by the people who seek to kill Scribner Place – and they make no effort to hide this fact.
But more significantly, the YMCA’s target demographic is precisely the one of most immediate appeal to the entrepreneurs Ms. Oates seeks, and with a more crucial long-term applicability to what we need to expand this zone into more residents downtown, which she also says she wants. One cannot simultaneously decry the lack of entrepreneurs, and attack the means of attracting them. We suggest that Ms. Oates take a long, hard look at Richard Florida’s body of work, among others. It’s obvious that she hasn’t thus far.
LO:
Now, the Redevelopment Commission has received its first $1 million payment from Caesar’s, and I’m not sure if those funds were used towards this aspect of the project or not. If so, that would mean our current investment is nominal. I suggest we leave it that way.
NAC:
A new and exciting motto (i.e., pathetic excuse) now emerges: “No investment at any price.” It has a nice ring to it. Give Councilman Coffey two more years, and he’ll even find it in a dictionary.
But he doesn’t read. Too bad for his constituents, and for the remainder of the city, which he’ll willingly hold hostage to his own excessive vanity ... if we permit it.
LO:
One question that is nagging at me is… if there is going to be a bond issue, how can the City Council vote on issuing bonds that will be tied to a Grant designated to the Redevelopment Commission and the YMCA, but not to the City? I'm still digging for more on the original plans, and will hopefully have more details later this week.
NAC:
It might be because the Redevelopment Commission is the city, but perhaps this is too simple a concept to build another conspiracy theory around.
A final thought: This may come as a surprise to many, but there is no doubting Ms. Oates’ sincerity. It is her methodology that is suspect, and her willingness to foment cultural warfare that is regrettable.
---
* Thanks to the Courier-Journal for reminding me of that one.
Touchingly concerned that differing opinions might disturb the bucolic equilibrium of the civic-minded “squeeze cooperation out of my cold, dead hands, pointy head” denizens frequenting her blog -- a forum laughably purporting to espouse free speech so long as it doesn’t nudge past the Tribune’s editorial standards in reading comprehension or embrace a viewpoint that doesn’t jibe with the gospel according to anonymous “little people” (their choice of identity, not ours) -- Ms. Oates also recently banned NA Confidential and “Bluegill” from sullying the corridors of her daily exercise in anti-intellectual mob empowerment.
Consequently, when she and her bedazzled fans make preposterous claims and subject the reading community to the tender crayon mercies of Luddite logic (2 + 2 = whatever I feel like -- today), there is no way to respond or to further the discussion without expending precious bandwidth here at NAC.
And this we’re prepared to do yet again, at least until the “little people” decide to take the unprecedented step of reading an American history book and considering the inconvenient topic of censorship – something apparently not broached in Sociology 101.
Today at Speak Out, Lout (NA), Ms. Oates asks:
LO:
Infrastructure or swimming pools? The City Council has planned another “workshop” session on the Scribner Place project that will be held Tuesday night, June 28th, at 6:30PM on the 3rd floor. However, no public comments or questions will be allowed. Great way to get some support back under this thing, don’t let anybody ask questions and don’t listen to anybody’s opinion.
NAC:
Currently there are more opinions about Scribner Place than there were cicadas last summer.
It has been at least three years since Regina Overton introduced the plan. How much time is necessary for the “little people” to become familiar with it and to formulate an opinion? Haven’t most done so already? Ms. Oates’ blog is all agog with the graffiti of anti-Scribner Place “concern taxpayers” and “new albany residents,” many of which have attended city council meetings regularly for years.
Did they not catch occasional references to Scribner Place in all that time? Haven’t they spoken against it during the public communications segment? Aren’t they taking turns frightening their “little” friends by creating vast conspiracies, and then fawning over knights in aluminum armor like Dan Coffey, who will deliver them from the future?
LO:
But, why should we be surprised? This thing is going to happen one way or another, and those who don’t like it better just shut up and keep their opinions to themselves. Most are just plain too stupid to know what’s good for them anyway. Right Baylor?
NAC:
On several occasions lately, Ms. Oates actually has reminded her readers that Scribner Place is inevitable, with only the manner of funding remaining to be shaped by public participation, which she obviously hopes to influence, or would not be blogging in the manner she has. So, it’s fairly obvious that no one is asking the community’s troglodytes to shut up.
Rather, we’re asking them to make sense. With respect to opinions, NA Confidential has advocated a consistent policy throughout its existence:
You are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts. *
Laura consistently has confused the two – opinion and fact -- during her stewardship of the “little people’s” blog, often indulging in the ham-fisted and non-discerning censorship of facts and factual discussions, while promoting flatulence as fact, and maintaining in a yet-to-be-determined fashion that the more downtrodden one is, the less that rules of civilized discourse and etiquette apply.
They’ll turn on you, Ms. Oates. Anyone seen our old chum Robespierre lately?
By the way, you’ll notice that consistently throughout the history of our debates, NA Confidential has referred to Laura Oates as “Laura” or “Ms. Oates,” opting for the more formal usage today because of her increasingly strident and intemperate treatment of my own given name.
LO:
Real smarts would tell you that since it's the ONLY plan, well then it must be a good plan.
NAC:
After much deliberation, we choose to regard this sentence as intended in the satirical sense. Since it fails satirically, might it be regarded as a miscarriage of rhetoric?
Might this handy designation be extended to the whole of Speak Out, Lout (NA)?
LO:
We have all been witness to the rantings of the insolents who support the proposed city investment into the YMCA-Scribner Place project, and we are all well aware of the nasty, rude remarks they have hurled at those who do not support their point of view. Rather than discussing the issue with some measure of decorum, they resort to name calling, insults on intelligence, and accusations of political agendas.
NAC:
Insolent? Who’s telling whom to shut up?
Time and time again, the “little people” have used Ms. Oates’ forum to vociferously demand the “agenda” of NA Confidential, Volunteer Hoosier and other progressive advocates in the city, and these entities have responded in essence that their agenda is progress, plain and simple.
Some of you are aware that when our friend Bluegill carefully and methodically responded to the opinions on Ms. Oates’ blog, and did so factually and utterly without “nasty” or “rude” hyperbole, his reward for doing so was being asked to leave, as his thoughts were deemed just too long-winded for the opinionated “little people” to be expected to digest.
It’d be like a person stepping into the cockpit of a plane and demanding to fly it, not because he has any factual proof that he knows how to fly an airplane (license, documentation, training), but because he “believes” he can do it (his opinion), and when you offer to teach him, he won’t listen because that’d take too long – and he’s in a great rush to go nowhere in particular.
LO:
The folks who do not agree with the city’s involvement in the project have been accused of an attitude of “no progress at any price”. I assert it is quite the contrary. The pro-spending crowd doesn’t seem to hear the pleas to invest in improvements and repairs to the inner city rather than plunking down huge amounts of money and resources into a venture that could potentially fail. Now, before anybody starts jumping up and down on that statement let me clarify. I personally would love to see a development such as the YMCA come to town, and I truly hope it will be successful. I am not against the YMCA development.
NAC:
Advocates of progress take the view that public financing should be utilized in order to do as much as possible with the resources we have at hand, whether by low-risk expenditures in infrastructure development that will help broaden the tax base and revitalize downtown, bringing needed jobs to the city and priming the pump for further growth, or by continuing the work of repairing and improving the existing infrastructure. There is no reason why these two strategies cannot be pursued at the same time – other than a lack of will and the inherent defeatism of a minority of the city’s citizenry.
LO:
However, I do not believe that New Albany city government is in any position to be involved in the commercial end of this endeavor. Particularly when there are so many problems with our infrastructure, and a desperate need for code enforcement, along with many other issues that affect quality of life here. Speaking of code enforcement, since the Council passed the approval of the position and salary, we have made no apparent progress towards implementing the job. Are we still getting one? Or are we being told there’s no money?
NAC:
There is no disagreement with respect to ordinance enforcement, although NA Confidential would like to see its scope broadened beyond the bare minimum proposed earlier this year.
LO: As for the Coffey Plan, I’m not so sure his plan would back this thing up all the way to zero’s. The city has already purchased land, and is in process of clearance and environmental cleanup. I believe that is a $1.5 million cost that has already been undertaken. The city plans to lease the cleared and cleaned land to the YMCA for $1 per year. One hell of a deal that would help any business get off to a good start (any hint of how to spawn more businesses?).
NAC:
Entrepreneurs spawn businesses. They do so by taking stock of the requirements necessary for their chosen field of expertise, and then seeking to utilize those factors in a business plan. Cities everywhere attempt to influence entrepreneurs by establishing favorable conditions for business operation, which today involves more than tax abatements and giveaways. It involves making a city a place where the workers of the future want to live, and if the workers of the future live in a city, the jobs created by entrepreneurs will in part come to the city because the workers' skills and outlook are the valued commodities in today’s economy.
Quite simply, the YMCA’s target demographic is roundly and loudly detested by the people who seek to kill Scribner Place – and they make no effort to hide this fact.
But more significantly, the YMCA’s target demographic is precisely the one of most immediate appeal to the entrepreneurs Ms. Oates seeks, and with a more crucial long-term applicability to what we need to expand this zone into more residents downtown, which she also says she wants. One cannot simultaneously decry the lack of entrepreneurs, and attack the means of attracting them. We suggest that Ms. Oates take a long, hard look at Richard Florida’s body of work, among others. It’s obvious that she hasn’t thus far.
LO:
Now, the Redevelopment Commission has received its first $1 million payment from Caesar’s, and I’m not sure if those funds were used towards this aspect of the project or not. If so, that would mean our current investment is nominal. I suggest we leave it that way.
NAC:
A new and exciting motto (i.e., pathetic excuse) now emerges: “No investment at any price.” It has a nice ring to it. Give Councilman Coffey two more years, and he’ll even find it in a dictionary.
But he doesn’t read. Too bad for his constituents, and for the remainder of the city, which he’ll willingly hold hostage to his own excessive vanity ... if we permit it.
LO:
One question that is nagging at me is… if there is going to be a bond issue, how can the City Council vote on issuing bonds that will be tied to a Grant designated to the Redevelopment Commission and the YMCA, but not to the City? I'm still digging for more on the original plans, and will hopefully have more details later this week.
NAC:
It might be because the Redevelopment Commission is the city, but perhaps this is too simple a concept to build another conspiracy theory around.
A final thought: This may come as a surprise to many, but there is no doubting Ms. Oates’ sincerity. It is her methodology that is suspect, and her willingness to foment cultural warfare that is regrettable.
---
* Thanks to the Courier-Journal for reminding me of that one.
Sunday, June 26, 2005
A jazzy afternoon with friends.
Today was the occasion for an intimate gathering at the lovely Westport, Kentucky riverside home of my friends Burkhard and Kay Masuhr.
Through their company, Masuhr International Marketing (MIM), Burkhard and Kay dip their toes into a variety of interesting events and concepts, and during the past weekend, they were kept busy introducing virtuoso jazz bassist and composer Morrie Louden to Louisville.
Along with his regular pianist Mike Eckroth, and supported by sax and drums, Morrie performed on Friday night at the Chapman Friedman Gallery in downtown Louisville.
New Albanian Brewing Company helped sponsor the event and provided the beer (Community Dark), and I worked the cold plate alongside the wine dispensing station manned by Barry and Leslie, the good people from River Bend Winery, which operates on 10th Street, between Main and Market, in the shadow of the 9th Street interstate ramp.
It was a good crowd of perhaps one hundred people on Saturday, and excellent jazz all evening long.
This afternoon, Morrie and Mike played in the Masuhr living room for a small group of friends and patrons, while Burkhard grilled genuine Nurnberger sausages and Kay directed the festivities.
It’s truly remarkable to watch a musician like Morrie up close and personal, and then enjoy the added bonus of having a craft-brewed beer with him afterwards, and Diana and I are grateful to Burkhard for the opportunity to participate.
We returned home around eight p.m., and discovered the alley behind our house filled with neighbors impatiently awaiting the arrival of the police, who’d been called to do something about a noisy domestic dispute in an historically bad rental property that faces Elm Street.
A beating with a broomstick in broad daylight, suspects fleeing, crazed occupant screaming obscenities, probable drug use … in every respect, a grudging return to the real world following an idyllic afternoon of musical fermentation and stress relief.
Through their company, Masuhr International Marketing (MIM), Burkhard and Kay dip their toes into a variety of interesting events and concepts, and during the past weekend, they were kept busy introducing virtuoso jazz bassist and composer Morrie Louden to Louisville.
Along with his regular pianist Mike Eckroth, and supported by sax and drums, Morrie performed on Friday night at the Chapman Friedman Gallery in downtown Louisville.
New Albanian Brewing Company helped sponsor the event and provided the beer (Community Dark), and I worked the cold plate alongside the wine dispensing station manned by Barry and Leslie, the good people from River Bend Winery, which operates on 10th Street, between Main and Market, in the shadow of the 9th Street interstate ramp.
It was a good crowd of perhaps one hundred people on Saturday, and excellent jazz all evening long.
This afternoon, Morrie and Mike played in the Masuhr living room for a small group of friends and patrons, while Burkhard grilled genuine Nurnberger sausages and Kay directed the festivities.
It’s truly remarkable to watch a musician like Morrie up close and personal, and then enjoy the added bonus of having a craft-brewed beer with him afterwards, and Diana and I are grateful to Burkhard for the opportunity to participate.
We returned home around eight p.m., and discovered the alley behind our house filled with neighbors impatiently awaiting the arrival of the police, who’d been called to do something about a noisy domestic dispute in an historically bad rental property that faces Elm Street.
A beating with a broomstick in broad daylight, suspects fleeing, crazed occupant screaming obscenities, probable drug use … in every respect, a grudging return to the real world following an idyllic afternoon of musical fermentation and stress relief.
Saturday, June 25, 2005
Changing New Albany ... one troglodyte at a time.
When the Ohio Valley weather gets hot and sticky, many people retreat indoors to the comfort of their air conditioning units.
Others of a less contemporary bent simply move deeper into their naturally climate-controlled hillside caves.
Burrowed safely underground, New Albany’s native species of troglodyte takes shelter from the heat and the blindingly harsh light of the 21st century, but unfortunately for the future of the city, its electrical grid remains operational, permitting our cave dwelling reactionary to log on and merrily embarrass the community with fascistic blather ineptly disguised as heroic rhetoric in defense of the downtrodden common man.
As fictional detective Nero Wolfe is enduringly fond of saying: “Pfui.”
To cite an example, consider this characteristic snippet gleaned from Daffy, a proud supporter of Speak Out, Lout (NA), where the “little people” tinkle supreme and the perpetually enabling moderator somehow manages to maintain a straight face while claiming to abhor personal attacks and rudeness – unless, of course, these vicious assaults are launched by the anonymous character assassins she so loves to protect, in which case such cowardly abuse is transformed through the magic of selective interpretation into good points made by nice people who are misunderstood.
Readers, let's give it up for Daffy (June 24 posting):
“On the subject of Baylor and Freedom of Speech. We have came up with a New Label for Baylor: (Code Blue) DNR."
Note: Try to forget the botched grammar; they’re quite touchy about that.
Now, for those unfamiliar with the nomenclature of reality police shows, “DNR” means “Do Not Resuscitate.”
The fact that “DNR” might easily be applied to the inherent philosophy of the concentration camp or the Guantanamo disgrace, and in this instance suffices as Daffy’s irony-free expression of unqualified disdain for the supposedly shared American precepts of free speech and open expression -- well, yet again, it tells you all you need to know with regard to the values held by the “no progress at any price” sect in New Albany.
NA Confidential responds by doffing a chapeau to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in 1936, during his first of three re-election campaigns, stepped back to take stock of his critics, and pegged the situation with deadly accuracy.
''They are unanimous in their hate for me,'' Roosevelt concluded, “and I welcome their hatred.''*
Man, this is fun.
*See Alan Ehrenhalt’s June 12 New York Times book review of “Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House,” by John F. Harris.
Others of a less contemporary bent simply move deeper into their naturally climate-controlled hillside caves.
Burrowed safely underground, New Albany’s native species of troglodyte takes shelter from the heat and the blindingly harsh light of the 21st century, but unfortunately for the future of the city, its electrical grid remains operational, permitting our cave dwelling reactionary to log on and merrily embarrass the community with fascistic blather ineptly disguised as heroic rhetoric in defense of the downtrodden common man.
As fictional detective Nero Wolfe is enduringly fond of saying: “Pfui.”
To cite an example, consider this characteristic snippet gleaned from Daffy, a proud supporter of Speak Out, Lout (NA), where the “little people” tinkle supreme and the perpetually enabling moderator somehow manages to maintain a straight face while claiming to abhor personal attacks and rudeness – unless, of course, these vicious assaults are launched by the anonymous character assassins she so loves to protect, in which case such cowardly abuse is transformed through the magic of selective interpretation into good points made by nice people who are misunderstood.
Readers, let's give it up for Daffy (June 24 posting):
“On the subject of Baylor and Freedom of Speech. We have came up with a New Label for Baylor: (Code Blue) DNR."
Note: Try to forget the botched grammar; they’re quite touchy about that.
Now, for those unfamiliar with the nomenclature of reality police shows, “DNR” means “Do Not Resuscitate.”
The fact that “DNR” might easily be applied to the inherent philosophy of the concentration camp or the Guantanamo disgrace, and in this instance suffices as Daffy’s irony-free expression of unqualified disdain for the supposedly shared American precepts of free speech and open expression -- well, yet again, it tells you all you need to know with regard to the values held by the “no progress at any price” sect in New Albany.
NA Confidential responds by doffing a chapeau to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in 1936, during his first of three re-election campaigns, stepped back to take stock of his critics, and pegged the situation with deadly accuracy.
''They are unanimous in their hate for me,'' Roosevelt concluded, “and I welcome their hatred.''*
Man, this is fun.
*See Alan Ehrenhalt’s June 12 New York Times book review of “Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House,” by John F. Harris.
County Commisioners tug on Kochert's policy rug; "concern taxpayer" spotted sticking pins in Garner doll
Loyal readers will recall New Albany's 4th district councilman Larry Kochert stating publicly during more than one city council meeting that he could not possibly support the downtown Scribner Place project without the participation of the county, a solemn utterance generally followed by the piercing, Duke Boys rebel yell of assent emanating from the direction of the 3rd District's ceremonial quisling, Steve Price.
Today we’ve learned that Floyd leaders get behind Scribner; Commissioners back New Albany project, courtesy of Ben Zion Hershberg of the Courier-Journal (limited shelf life for C-J links).
Next up is the County Council, where Larry McAllister already is tapping on the brakes of his late model used sedan, warning listeners like reporter Hershberg that unless there's a way to include realtor buddy Don McCartin in the transaction, it’s no dice for any council-supported venture.
Meanwhile, Councilman Kochert is said to be loading a picnic basket and embarking on a horse ‘n’ buggy excursion to the heart of local darkness, Speak Out, Lout (NA), to press the flesh with the unreconstructed Brambleberries and accept their semi-literate murmurings and thus contrive a new flagship objection to progress in the city.
Now that’s constituent service.
See also:
The Kochert Dilemma and News Reported, Commentary Deferred at Volunteer Hoosier, and have a fine muggy summer weekend.
Today we’ve learned that Floyd leaders get behind Scribner; Commissioners back New Albany project, courtesy of Ben Zion Hershberg of the Courier-Journal (limited shelf life for C-J links).
Next up is the County Council, where Larry McAllister already is tapping on the brakes of his late model used sedan, warning listeners like reporter Hershberg that unless there's a way to include realtor buddy Don McCartin in the transaction, it’s no dice for any council-supported venture.
Meanwhile, Councilman Kochert is said to be loading a picnic basket and embarking on a horse ‘n’ buggy excursion to the heart of local darkness, Speak Out, Lout (NA), to press the flesh with the unreconstructed Brambleberries and accept their semi-literate murmurings and thus contrive a new flagship objection to progress in the city.
Now that’s constituent service.
See also:
The Kochert Dilemma and News Reported, Commentary Deferred at Volunteer Hoosier, and have a fine muggy summer weekend.
Friday, June 24, 2005
State commerce agency to New Albany: It's dirty work, and we're happy you're doing it, not us
Statistics released this morning by the Indiana Department of Commerce show that the city of New Albany now leads the entire state in the production of unverifiable rumors and the fabrication of ambiguous statistics, with both these non-remunerative activities overtaking traditional retail and manufacturing as a source of amusement during waking hours, especially among a grayer demographic.
According to Indiana state economist N. B. Forrest, “New Albany traditionally has done wonders with spouting breathtaking ignorance and misinterpreting funky numbers,” but the percentage increase during the past three months has caught analysts completely by surprise.
“Quite frankly, we don’t know where all that mongering and factoid creation is coming from,” noted Forrest, who added, “New Albany currently is producing unmitigated nonsense at a pace far beyond that sustained by Indianapolis, a city many twenty times New Albany’s size.”
Unfortunately, New Albany’s recent success comes in a sector of the economy that many Indiana cities have abandoned in favor of more balanced, rational growth.
“The problem here is that the more people you have engaged in perpetuating irresponsible imbecility and conjuring phantom numbers, the fewer you get actually working and contributing to the tax base,” said Forrest, who in conclusion adds, “malice spreading and numerical mayhem keep a less skilled portion of the population busy, but many of us worry that’s it’s simply no way to run a railroad, much less a modern city.”
According to Indiana state economist N. B. Forrest, “New Albany traditionally has done wonders with spouting breathtaking ignorance and misinterpreting funky numbers,” but the percentage increase during the past three months has caught analysts completely by surprise.
“Quite frankly, we don’t know where all that mongering and factoid creation is coming from,” noted Forrest, who added, “New Albany currently is producing unmitigated nonsense at a pace far beyond that sustained by Indianapolis, a city many twenty times New Albany’s size.”
Unfortunately, New Albany’s recent success comes in a sector of the economy that many Indiana cities have abandoned in favor of more balanced, rational growth.
“The problem here is that the more people you have engaged in perpetuating irresponsible imbecility and conjuring phantom numbers, the fewer you get actually working and contributing to the tax base,” said Forrest, who in conclusion adds, “malice spreading and numerical mayhem keep a less skilled portion of the population busy, but many of us worry that’s it’s simply no way to run a railroad, much less a modern city.”
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