ON THE AVENUES is taking a break.

From BEER MONEY at the Tribune to ON THE AVENUES at NAC -- how my weekly column came to be.

In the days of my youth, back when the former Tribune actually mattered, a lifer named Jack Powers was the staff do-it-all. He covered the social and political waterfronts in his column, On the Avenues, with the help of an all-purpose editorial source and assistant, the so-called Green Mouse.

My column honors these quaint and mostly forgotten aspects of local journalism in New Albany.

I've always been proud of my ability to conjure a weekly essay out of the ether, and locating just the right reruns to fill the slot when things get hectic.

At the same time, since shedding a few tons of personal political baggage in the aftermath of the 2019 primary election, the effect has been somewhat akin to the windstorm that knocks down old trees and regenerates new growth on the forest floor.

Or maybe I've been drinking too much. I can't ever tell.

Either way the column needs recalibrating of its own. ON THE AVENUES probably will return next week, perhaps on Wednesday instead of Tuesday. As Pints&union approaches its first birthday on August 1, a work routine has gradually come into place. This generally means a front-loaded week, with lots to do on Monday and Tuesday, and less from Wednesday through the remainder of the week. 

Consequently publishing the column on Wednesday allows an extra morning to write. I don't intend to radically change anything about the column. There merely needs to be a break and an opportunity to think.

Your indulgence is appreciated, and as always, thanks for reading.

An idea so good that it's doomed: Metro Louisville "should turn its golf courses into walkable neighborhoods."

We have all been here before.

Experts say golf is dying, and if so, expect the redevelopment vultures to circle New Albany Springs.

I think it's a great idea to repurpose golf courses into something remotely useful. Retain some of the green space, build living spaces, and make it walkable.

Golf scramble? Nah, but scrambled eggs and chorizo sound good to me right about now.

Streets for People: Metro should turn its golf courses into walkable neighborhoods, by Chris Glasser (Insider Louisville)

As Insider Louisville’s Joe Sonka reported last week, Mayor Greg Fischer’s 2020 budget calls for the closing of up to four of the city’s 10 public golf courses. Reports indicate that only three of the courses are operating at a profit, with the courses showing an overall operating loss of $700,000.

With the golf courses on the chopping block, the question has become what to do with them?

The most straightforward approach, potentially, would be to find a private company to run them. Councilman Brandon Coan has floated another idea for the course in his district: donating Cherokee Golf Course to the Olmsted Parks Conservancy.

Scott Martin, the former director of The Parklands at Floyds Fork and current director of River Heritage Conservancy, mused on Facebook that the Cherokee Golf Course would have been a great site for the Botanical Gardens project.

I would like to propose a quite different option: the city should repurpose some of these courses as mixed-use, mixed-income, walkable neighborhoods.

As has been observed in Metro Council hearings on the matter, golf as a sport is losing popularity, and courses across the country are closing because of it.

“Long term . . . I think we’re going to keep seeing a greater and greater amount of general funds being drawn into golf,” Metro’s budget director David Frockt said.

Put another way, this isn’t so much a Louisville budget problem or even, as some would like to make it, a government mismanagement problem; it’s a golf problem.

This reality makes closing some of the Metro Parks courses a fundamentally different kind of decision than that of closing the Metro Parks swimming pools ...

At The Aggregate, a discussion of the ethics and legality of Slick Jeffrey's 4-H Fair propaganda blitz.

As we've pointed out numerous times in the past, the campaign finance cash Jeff Gahan collects from pay-to-play special interest donors and the tax proceeds we all pay into local government are often co-mingled to the point of pea soup fog. Too many voters shrug it off. They shouldn't.

The problem is compounded by the mayor's ego, which has long since swelled past the dimensions of a dirigible. He genuinely believes the press clippings generated by his own propaganda commissariat, and he can't tell the difference between the city and himself.

We can do something about this in November: #FireGahan2019

Gahan for Mayor at the Fair?, by Daniel Johnson and Madison Miller (The Aggregate)

Last Wednesday, on a sunny day in New Albany, the Fair in Floyd County was offering everything from classic fair food to a full rodeo and grandstand events. It has been a long tradition, particularly in our smaller communities, for kids to bring their livestock and show them off before the market sale. For many of these kids, the Fair will be the highlight of the season. In the photograph above, Jeff Gahan, the current Mayor of New Albany, who is up for re-election this year, enjoys this event alongside his constituents by handing out free ride tickets in front of a Floyd County Democratic Party tent. Voters will be sure to remember this at the booth come election day. This was one of many Mayor’s Nights that have been going on for years, and it was not the first time Gahan has participated. However, this act of kindness has some political implications that, it could be argued, are unethical, or worse, illegal.

As voters in a republic, we all deserve to have the full context of actions taken by elected officials ...

A Hunter S. Thompson documentary: Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride.

A 2006 New York Times review is here, and it's accurate. The documentary is entertaining but superficial. The decidedly unromantic "flip" side to Hunter S. Thompson's declining years is discussed in greater detail by Joe Rogan and his guest, author Timothy Denevi.

A solid preview of The Standard Plate & Pour, coming to the former Gospel Bird footprint.

Good things happen when writers aren't bound by the imperative to write to a 3rd-grade level and produce text capable of being read in two minutes. The newspaper's editors give recent hire McAfee almost1,000 words, and she uses them quite well, producing one of the better Tom May Content Coagulator restaurant previews in a while.

Speaking personally, I've come to dislike the word "gastropub." This implies nothing more than a continuing internal rebellion against my own past pretentiousness, and isn't about the new establishment; all the best to them, and I look forward to seeing the craft beer selection.

Former Gospel Bird spot to become New Albany's next gastropub, by Brooke McAfee (Hanson's Folly)

NEW ALBANY — Business partners Tim Smith and Beau Kerley have been hoping to open a restaurant in New Albany or Jeffersonville for quite some time.

And when the former Gospel Bird space in downtown New Albany became available, it gave them the perfect opportunity to create their new concept. Their gastropub, The Standard Plate & Pour, is moving into the space at 207 E. Main St. Smith and Kerley are preparing to open their restaurant on June 24.

"This was pretty much a no-brainer," Smith said. "We discussed this for like two days, and it was like, how can we not do this?"

And just a few days later, they had the keys to the building. The space was home to the Gospel Bird for three years before the restaurant closed in November 2018.

Over the past 10 years, Kerley and Smith have worked together to open a variety of restaurants in the area, including 812 Pizza Co. in Georgetown and Crescent Hill Craft House in Louisville. Kerley has also been a co-owner of Bluegrass Brewing Co. in Louisville for about 12 years, and Smith has many years of experience as a chef ...

Stop building new infrastructure: "One Iconoclast’s Blunt Message on Transportation Funding."

This one's from 2015, but worth repeating.

Our recent experience in New Albany illustrates Charles Marohn's basic point. We're overbuilding local infrastructure wants while calling them needs; and Jeff Gahan has affixed his personal campaign finance needs to the profuse kickbacks from these wants.

One Iconoclast’s Blunt Message on Transportation Funding, by Alan Ehrenhalt (Governing)

After advising municipalities on how to construct roads for years, Charles Marohn now believes America needs to stop building new highways. Will his new way of thinking catch on?

... (Charles Marohn) reiterated his view that the country can survive a while longer without a sweeping new federal transportation bill. Doing nothing, he said, “is preferable to throwing a lot of money at the current approach.”

The gospel according to Marohn is simple enough to put into a few words: We have built too many highways. We have built them in places that didn’t need them. We have built them in places that can’t afford to maintain them. That’s why the federal Transportation Trust Fund is going broke. And if Congress approves a new transportation bill under the old rules, we’ll just build more unneeded roads and force the communities that host them into a further cycle of debt.

Marohn isn’t against spending federal dollars to repair the infrastructure we have. He’s against handing more money over to transportation planners who will always be able to find an excuse to build something new. “The present system is overbuilt and is going to contract,” Marohn recently wrote. “We have so much transportation infrastructure that every level of government is now choking on maintenance costs. I’m tired of seeing bridges fall down and expensive roads go bad while we spend billions on new stuff we will never be able to maintain” ...

Gahan's "Stormwater Blues" really had this one pegged.

But he writes randomized typographic filler text with the best of them.

It terrifies Jeff Gahan, so let's have "A Brief Look at Indiana's LGBT+ History."

So far this June the city's Facebook propaganda insemination device has shown Mayor Jeff Gahan observing youngsters at River Run, kibitzing with car owners, touting a mobile dental clinic he had nothing to do with, telling lies to 4-H fair attendees and playing air guitar at Bicentennial Park.

It's an election year, so taxpayers might yet subsidize de facto campaign videos of Gahan shaving, smoking the perfect brisket and winning multiple games of chess against 1980s-vintage Radio Shack computers.

What the Facebook feed hasn't shown, at least yet, is even a semblance of comprehension that it's LGBT Pride Month.

That's because the older DemoDisneyDixiecrats on whom the mayor relies for love (the money comes from pay-to play, out-of-town companies) feel very uncomfortable about them uppity gays -- and younger voters dazzled by Gahan's Oz-the-all-powerful bullshit won't make the slightest effort to peel away the layers and see the ethical rot underneath.

Let's have a few loaded Rice Krispies Treats, pour a glass of Gahan's high octane Kool-Aid, and restore the ideological balance. This strikes me as a balanced portryal of the topic. Maybe Gahan actually will read -- either this or anything else apart from his name on the bulging donor envelope handed him by contractors eager to score a few more no-bid bonanzas.

A Brief Look at Indiana's LGBT+ History, by Daniel Johnson (The Aggregate)

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Pride, a national celebration of LGBT identity that materializes in the form of parades, concerts, drag shows, and other events that give LGBT persons the freedom to be themselves in public, mostly without fear of reproach. Yesterday, Indy Pride hosted its 2019 festival. In honor of Pride month and the legacy of Indiana’s LGBT community, we want to take a brief look at Indiana’s history to shed light on its gay community. Despite what some may think, Indiana has a long history of queer activism and scholarship, though it is counter-balanced by its more extensive history of gay oppression ...

Meanwhile, why would it be any different in 2019?

Here's a scrap for the AdamBot: "The One Thing Trump Gets Right About Tariffs."

"For the past few decades, policymakers have embraced neoliberalism, a broadly open-market political philosophy whose effects have been to redirect more power toward the economically powerful and marginalize the economic majority. Things may be changing."

I don't make it a habit to read Politico, but this one's sensible.

The One Thing Trump Gets Right About Tariffs, by Jennifer M. Harris and Todd Tucker (Politico)

 ... Much as it pains their colleagues—and as hard as it is for Washington to process this—Trump and his backers have a real point. Not about his immigration policies, which are part of a harmful cultural war and stand a real chance of inflicting long-term damage on the American economy. But the administration’s use of tariffs to push its foreign policy goals is not as irrational as Trump’s enemies make it seem. It shouldn’t be this way, but in 2019, if the United States wants to fix some of the big policy arguments it has with its trading partners, it has left little leverage besides the blunt tool of tariffs.

For that, the blame lies with Democratic and Republican administrations alike, including Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, who collectively have let U.S. economic policy shrink in ambition—a battle fought on a narrower and narrower field, leaving us with so few weapons that tariffs have become the most useful last resort.

A nation as powerful as the United States would traditionally be expected to have a fully developed economic and industrial policy, one that integrates incentives and priorities on the domestic front with carrots and sticks for foreign partners. In that universe, Mexico’s own immigration enforcement might be part of a much wider package of goals negotiated between the two nations, one that creates strong incentives for Mexico to comply, without hurting American consumers and companies the way tariffs would.

This fuller agenda, which some experts call economic statecraft, has been the norm for much of the country’s history. But unlike America's competitors, the United States has largely shelved this kind of economic thinking. President Obama, for instance, pitched the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement as a way to ensure that America, rather than China, would write the rules of the global economy. But under the hood, it was never a very compelling economic argument for the United States: The rules that China negotiates in its own trade deals overlapped considerably with the American proposal, meaning that the TPP was more a matter of diplomatic gamesmanship than a real plan to advance workers here at home

To politicians like Obama, raised in the heyday of global free-market consensus, government industrial policy is a thing of the past, and trade relationships are really just a matter of opening as many markets as possible—regardless of whether the benefits actually outweigh the losses for a given country. The evidence now strongly suggests that consensus has been wrong. To take just one problem, the magnitude of corporate tax evasion made possible by modern trade agreements should make all of us question whether the traditional lifting-all-boats assumptions of trade efficiency still hold up.

With Trump's election, it's now acceptable to at least name the problems the U.S. has confronted on the world stage, ranging from coercive Chinese requirements over our manufacturers to corporations invoking their global supply-chain decisions as a reason we can’t fundamentally rethink U.S. trading rules. But Trump’s solutions to those problems suffer just as much from an absence of creative ambition ...

Come with me and escape ... from the Watch Tower: "Armageddon is always coming tomorrow."

Photo from Insider Louisville.

Kevin Gibson has written a fine article about (Insider Louisville) "a former Jehovah’s Witness and his quest to help others."

First, an excerpt from Wikipedia about the ... Christian denomination -- or is it a cult? Definitely a fringe sect among believers, claiming a mere 8.5 million adherents worldwide.

Jehovah's Witnesses are best known for their door-to-door preaching, distributing literature such as The Watchtower and Awake!, and refusing military service and blood transfusions. They consider the use of God's name vital for proper worship. They reject Trinitarianism, inherent immortality of the soul, and hellfire, which they consider to be unscriptural doctrines. They do not observe Christmas, Easter, birthdays or other holidays and customs they consider to have pagan origins incompatible with Christianity. They prefer to use their own Bible translation, the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, although their literature occasionally quotes and cites other Bible translations. Adherents commonly refer to their body of beliefs as "The Truth" and consider themselves to be "in the Truth". They consider secular society to be morally corrupt and under the influence of Satan, and most limit their social interaction with non-Witnesses. Congregational disciplinary actions include disfellowshipping, their term for formal expulsion and shunning. Baptized individuals who formally leave are considered disassociated and are also shunned. Disfellowshipped and disassociated individuals may eventually be reinstated if deemed repentant.

Read Gibson's articles here:

Shunned: A former Jehovah’s Witness and his quest to help others (part 1)

Shunned: A former Jehovah’s Witness and his quest to help others (part 2)

 ... (Mike) Shemwell, now 41, hosts a podcast called “Shunned,” through which he not only tells his own story, but allows guests to tell their stories about escaping religious cults and other oppressive situations.

The podcast has more than 100,000 unique downloads, and Shemwell has found himself a guest on several other such shows.

The number of those excommunicated, often by choice, from such religions is growing, Shemwell says. He wants to help people not only escape their situations if they so desire, but also to heal once they’ve moved into a more “normal” lifestyle.

For the Shemwells, they faced a life of never seeing or hearing from their families again when they left. They faced a world in which they had no friends.

But they’ve not only survived — they’ve thrived. They now have a legion of friends, ironically, in people they knew before they were “disfellowshipped” from the religion as clients of their cleaning business. They’ve visited Niagara Falls and hiked the Adirondacks. They live a happy, American life.

But from the time Shemwell was 8, life was not so free, nor was it always happy ...

Joe Biden: "Cynical contempt for social-justice values."

As it stands, I'm still with Bernie Sanders for 2020, although Elizabeth Warren might do in a pinch. Joe Biden? Nope.

When Joe Biden Collaborated With Segregationists, by Jonathan Kozol (The Nation)

The candidate’s years as an anti-busing crusader cannot be forgotten—or readily forgiven.

Advocates for children and civil rights who have not yet given up entirely on the struggle to break down the walls of racial isolation in our public schools may want to take a good hard look at Joe Biden’s shameful record on school segregation. Despite his recent effort to allay concerns about that record, it cannot be expunged or easily forgiven.

Biden has made no apologies for his willingness to rip apart the final remnants of the legacy of Brown at a seminal moment in our nation’s history. As The Washington Post candidly surmised, his “decision to stand by his views on the issue illustrates what some of his supporters think would be his advantage in the 2020 field: his ability to appeal beyond his Democratic base to some white working-class voters who voted for Donald Trump in 2016.” This may seem smart strategy to some. But it reeks of cynical contempt for social-justice values, even if his strategists attempt to dress it up as nothing more than shrewd consensus building.

Like other careful centrists, Biden threads the needle on the subject of diversity by saying that he favors it in principle, even in the face of his decades-long resistance to letting children climb onto a bus in order to achieve it. This is simply doublespeak. In a nation where residential segregation and unabated patterns of redlining have guaranteed the seemingly eternal sequestration of black and Hispanic children in poorly funded schools within their communities, Biden’s many years of strident opposition to letting children ride the good old yellow bus represent a throwback to the age of Plessy v. Ferguson ...

BOOKS: Merely using the word "Thanatoid" tells you which novel I'm reading.

Reading may lead to an adjustment in brain chemistry. At least I hope it does. The current selection reposing atop the nightstand is Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland, more about which in a moment.

A brief digression: I actually do believe in ghosts, just not the supernatural spirit sort. Rather, I believe in the ghosts inhabiting my own head space. At the present time, while scanning and annotating 30-year-old slides, these ghosts are proliferating. 

Up until the spring of 2017 little of this would have occurred to me. But my mother died in 2017, and during the weeks that followed her passing a book I was struggling mightily to comprehend at the time suddenly began speaking to me: Alan Moore's gargantuan novel Jerusalem.

Each of Jerusalem’s chapters offers a vignette centering on one of the Boroughs’ many diverse inhabitants, including humans, angels, demons, and time-traveling ghosts; the characters’ lives intersect in space and time (and other higher dimensions), forming an intricate web of narrative interconnections.

Later that summer, fulfilling a promise I'd made to a friend, I somewhat unwillingly undertook to read Lincoln in the Bardo, a novel by George Saunders. I found it oddly compelling. Saunders provides insight:

Without giving anything away, let me say this: I made a bunch of ghosts. They were sort of cynical; they were stuck in this realm, called the bardo (from the Tibetan notion of a sort of transitional purgatory between rebirths), stuck because they'd been unhappy or unsatisfied in life. The greatest part of their penance is that they feel utterly inessential – incapable of influencing the living.

Now it's Pynchon and the characteristic oddity of the Thanatoids, who appear in Vineland. "Thanat" is the Greek word for death, and "-oid" suggests an imperfect resemblance: deathlike.

Thanatoids are ambiguous beings, creatures of entropy. They “watch a lot of Tube,” living in ghostly communities like Shade Creek, where DL and Takeshi (the “Karmic Adjuster” almost accidentally killed by DL thinking she was killing Brock Vond with the ninjic “Vibrating Palm” — is anything harder to summarize than a Pynchon plot?) meet Ortho Bob Dulang, their first Thanatoid. They “limit themselves… to emotions helpful in setting right whatever was keeping them from advancing further into the condition of death… the most common by far was resentment…”

Thanatoids seem more zombie-like than ghostly, and in typical Pynchon fashion it's all kept quite confusing.

Moore's ghosts are ghosts; they cannot interact or be heard by humans ... except in certain cases, when they can influence the living. Saunders takes it from there by means of his bardo (with reciprocity in the case of Lincoln, who enhances the self-esteem of the dead). Thanatoids apparently cannot completely die until their resentments are abated.

Literature is neither real life, nor real death. The ghosts I've created remain inside my own head. They seem slightly more unreal than before, although only a wee bit.

Mark Seabrook is being transparent about his health: "I am running for mayor of New Albany and I am ready to go."

I spoke with Mark Seabrook last week and we covered much the same ground. Seabrook looks and sounds much improved to me.

My two cents: Game on. Whether you're for or against Seabrook, it is fitting and proper that he has been open about his health issues and what he's done to get better. The forthcoming general election needs to be about issues that pertain to the city's future. We already know that Jeff Gahan will be ducking these issues. Now we'll see how the Republicans and independent candidate Dan Coffey handle them.

New Albany mayoral candidate puts drop-out rumors to rest, by Chris Morris (Jeffersonville News and Tribune)

NEW ALBANY — Mark Seabrook has heard the rumors circulating around town about him having to drop out of the race for New Albany mayor due to his health. He has had to answer questions for the past month, reassuring people that he is all in and not going anywhere.

"I am running for mayor of New Albany and I am ready to go," he said Friday.

It's true that Seabrook, who is 67, has dealt with some health issues in the past month. He had a pacemaker put in and during his stay in the hospital, was told he needed to go on dialysis three days a week. While he admits he was discouraged about the prognosis at first, he says he has been "re-energized" and feels better than he has for "a couple of years."

"At first that was very devastating to me," he said about having to go on dialysis. "I had a misconception of what that was. But without it, I wasn't going to be able to pursue my two favorite interests, which were playing with my grandkids and serving this community" ...

Art on the Parish Green returns this weekend with its 13th iteration.

Sans byline, here's the newspaper's article about Art on the Parish Green, which takes place Friday and Saturday. If you travel via Market Street, be aware that the eastbound lane was closed on Friday morning to facilitate the festival's setup.

The question-and-answer with Fran Fach is quite good; it's just not clear who conducted it, newspaper or festival. From a personal standpoint, it's bittersweet to see the beer sponsorship pass from NABC to Donum Dei; nothing whatever against the latter, but I was always proud to help out Art on the Parish Green during my time at NABC.

The only constant is change, and the good news is that Art on the Parish Green has not only survived. It has thrived.

EASY BEING GREEN: Art on the Parish Green celebrates 13th year

The popular Art on the Parish Green festival celebrates its 13th year this weekend at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church at 11th and Main streets in downtown New Albany.

The event, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, features nearly 100 select fine arts and crafts vendors, food trucks, a beer/wine garden, live music, a YMCA Kids Art Place, and a Jazz Mass on the Grass Sunday at 10 a.m.

Below is a Q&A with festival coordinator Fran Fach about this year’s event ...

Cheerleading clinic: "Downtown New Albany's largest yearly pep session was held Thursday afternoon at The Grand."

Anything I might say about DNA's Pillar Awards would be superfluous (not to mention likely to be misinterpreted), so I'll confine my remarks to just one statement, which is not to be taken in any other way than straightforward and accurate:

For so long as Todd Coleman doesn't receive one of these awards, they'll continue to be meaningless.

Why am I saying this?

Because it's true. Now on to the boilerplate.

CHEERING ON NEW ALBANY: Develop New Albany hands out Pillar Awards, by Chris Morris (Hanson's Ongoing Tragedy)

NEW ALBANY — Downtown New Albany's largest yearly pep session was held Thursday afternoon at The Grand ...

The partial first sentence is followed by the obligatory inclusion of our Genius of the Flood Plain, as eloquent as usual without someone literate to spoon-feed him a script.

New Albany Mayor Jeff Gahan praised the organization for promoting the downtown and hosting events to bring people to the area.

"They do a great job," he said.

Today's must-see video: "The traditional development pattern outperforms the suburban development pattern every time."

“In the new, experimental style of development, you have a building pattern that is not very financially productive and is really, really fragile. In the traditional style of development, you have a building form and approach that is financially really productive and highly adaptable and resilient over time.”
— Charles Marohn

I've nothing to add to this. It's as clearly stated as this can be done, and it's only four minutes of your time.

The traditional development pattern has tremendous financial upside and limited financial downside. In contrast, the suburban approach has limited financial upside and a downside that can literally go negative.

The following video explains why the traditional development pattern outperforms the suburban development pattern every time. It's part of a series called the Curbside Chat. If you've been a member of Strong Towns for a while, you're probably familiar with it. If not, it's time to acquaint yourself.

The summer 2019 issue of Food & Dining Magazine has arrived.

The new issue of Food & Dining Magazine is available for viewing online and currently is being delivered to hotels and racks. The quarterly magazine is entirely supported by advertising and arrives completely free to readers. Links are provided below.

My contribution is a survey of craft beer in 2019.

Craft Beer Nation wins because people like craft beer, but when we swipe our debit card for a case of Founders Solid Gold it’s just the final transaction of many required to take beer from origins in water, malt, hops and yeast to our waiting lips.

Another article of great interest to me is Susan Reigler's profile of Chad and Lauren Coulter, originators of the LouVino wine bar. Amid the never ending uncertainty surrounding New Albany's River City Winery, I look at the space and its adjoining former Preston Arts building and see LouVino (or something similar) written all over it.

Happy reading. When you patronize one of the magazine's advertisers, tell them you saw their advertisement in Food & Dining.

SUMMER 2019 ISSUE

FEATURES

PROFILE | Fernando Martinez

Fernando Martinez is one of the most prolific restaurateurs this city has ever known. With 15 restaurants to his credit, he and his team at Ole’ Restaurant Group are set to launch another volley. 

PROFILE | Jared Matthews

Over the last decade, Jared Matthews has blossomed into a rising star as the managing partner in four restaurants and bars. Hold the press! Make that five.

PROFILE | Chad Coulter

Chad and Lauren Coulter’s LouVino has grown to five locations in three states, and they’ve opened the first of their newest concept, Biscuit Belly.

COLUMNS

COMINGS &  GOINGS |

A summary of changes in the local restaurant scene — with openings, closings, moves and more.

HUMOR | Disruptive Restaurant Tech 

Resident food humorist Jay Forman imagines a line of technology that might disrupt the food industry in the future.

RECIPES

COOKING WITH RON | A Vegan Paradise

Ron creates vegan dishes from the summer bounty of excellent fresh vegetables and fruit by local farmers.

EASY ENTERTAINING | Toast to Toast

Tired of avocado toast? Tim and Lori Laird offer a variety of other creative toast treat recipes that are sure to please.

LIQUIDS

HIP HOPS | Craft Beer All Grown Up

Craft Beer has gone from mom n’ pop shop to button-down boardroom, and Roger Baylor learns firsthand that the business of craft beer is business.

BOURBON | The Neeley Family Distillery

Maybe you’ve never heard of the Neeleys, but they’ve been making whiskey for 11 generations and legally for one. Steve Akley recounts their bloody family history.

DINING GUIDE
Our comprehensive listing of over 1,400 area restaurants, complete with reviews.

The cameramen and their story: "Memories of D-Day."

I'm fortunate to have visited the beaches during my first two trips in 1985 and 1987.

Deutsche Welle's excellent 45-minute video is a welcome to departure from the norm because it explains exactly how a handful of British cameramen captured images of the landings in their sector. It's a fascinating story.

6 June 1944: D-Day. Alongside the British troops were cameramen and photographers tasked with recording the Normandy landings. The images they took give us new insights into the greatest seaborne invasion in history.

Operation Overlord began in the early morning of 6 June 1944, as the first Allied landing craft headed for the Normandy beaches. Cameramen and photographers tasked with recording the experience were embedded with the British troops. The images taken by veteran photographers Peter Norris, Harry Oakes, John Aldred and Peter Handford show us D-Day through the eyes of British troops as they fought their way off the beaches against stiff German resistance.

Following up: Kudos to the city for the cleanup.

I'm told the city dispatched a crew to pack away the garbage and construction debris from the alley behind Pints&union, and they're to be thanked for doing so -- as is the health department for coming yesterday to have a look.

This has happened before, and it almost certainly will occur again. All we can hope for is that the city gets serious with the violators.

Why we can't have nice things, Volume 467 (illegal alley dumping edition).

As it appeared yesterday morning.

Multi-modal planning to break the pattern of automobile dependency.

"Many current planning practices reinforce a cycle of increased automobile use, more automobile-oriented community redevelopment, and reduced mobility options. There are good reasons to break this pattern."

What I like about this piece is the way Litman refutes the familiar and shrill "either-or" war-on-cars paradigm by which car-centrists tend to frame the debate.

Multi-modal planning is nothing more than redressing an unsustainable and counter-productive imbalance. As Bluegill noted elsewhere yesterday:

Drivers are often very quick to point out proportionality when they think they pay for all the streets and roads. I like to hook them up with actual facts and then ask which half or so of street space they prefer so other users can have the other half.

It's important reading.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be walking downtown to get my hair cut.

Breaking the Cycle of Automobile Dependency, by Todd Litman (Planetizen)

... People sometimes misrepresent these issues, implying that the alternative to automobile dependency is a car-free transport system, but in most cases the best system is multi-modal, in which people use the most appropriate option for each trip: walking and bicycling for local errands, public transit on major travel corridors, and automobiles when they are truly most efficient overall, considering all impacts. Multi-modal planning ensures that everybody, including people who cannot, should not, or prefer not to drive receive their fair share of public investments in transport facilities and services ...