Hyde Park Urbanist

"The City was a Sea of Green"

Quoting Beijing: From Imperial Capital to Olympic City by Li, Dray-Novey and Kong (p.99-100):

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers considered Beijing's natural surroundings quite pleasant; in summer and fall, the city seemed park-like.  The view from the Western Hills toward the city was a sea of green, interrupted only by a few yellow-tiled rooftops peeking out from the foliage.  Looking west from the Imperial City during his 1849-1850 stay, the Russian envoy Kovalevsky enjoyed the "remarkable view, bright, shining, enchanting...  Before us rose the massive indented walls, surrounding a series of palaces" under the "wonderful sky, clear, blue, transparent... and the clear aromatic air." 

In his book When a Billion Chinese Jump, Jonathan Watts argues that China has become a dumping ground for the west's polluting industries and the country's bountiful supplies of coal present an all too tempting energy source.  The human misery wrapped up in coal extraction and polluting factories will undoubtedly fill volumes.  Still, I can understand how China came to have those problems; I'm less understanding of their embrace of the American disease, this idea that a middle-class lifestyle depends on owning a private automobile.  Just as our young are increasingly rejecting auto dependence, Chinese cities are crowding out bicycles.  When the air quality index in Beijing goes "crazy bad", I think we know what to blame.

And yet, Beijing has done a damned good job on trees.  Here we have a rapidly-growing city where acquiring land to build residential properties can be quite difficult, yet trees are protected.  Towers rise above the trees, sure, but in between the towers are lots of trees.  I can't think of any area of Beijing as big as Chicago's Loop that's as devoid of trees. 

In the photo to the right, the strip of green just on the other side of Zhongguancun Street is where subway line #4 runs.  Above it, they could have built parking lots or widened the road, but instead we have trees.

The photo at the top of this article was taken in Jingshan Park, right in the middle of the city.  You're looking northwest toward our Center.  Were I to walk in a straight line northwest, I might have to cross four lakes: Beihai, Qianhai, Houhai and Xihai.  And soon I'd start hitting University campuses every so often, some nice and some just ok.  Beyond the Center, though, would be Peking University, which is drop-dead gorgeous.  The Summer Palace is further west and the Old Summer Palace north.  Both Peking U and the palaces have lakes, too.  After that is the Botannical Gardens and then you hit the Fragrant Hills.

On clear days, Beijing is still a sea of green, albeit a city with towers rising thru the trees.

Vending Books and Dating Values

I took a 3-day vacation in Seoul recently.  At an el station on the Seoul Metro, I spotted this vending machine that sells popular books.  Rail transit plus books... that's a swell combination for your Hyde Park Urbanist.

But I'm not sure how worthwhile these Korean language books are.  The A, B, O, and AB books are about blood types, which many Japanese and Koreans believe influences personalities and therefore should be considered for dating purposes.

Asians seem to put a lot of value into stereotypes like this, with regional generalizations deemed important in China.  Beijing women are considered to be independent, while Shanghai men tend to be led by their wives-- so I've heard, anyway.  All this informs dating preferences.

Americans may have individual preferences for certain looks, I guess, but it seems we tend to value one thing more than any other when it comes to dating.  Most of us just want the sexiest partner we can find.

Hyde Park (HPKCC) Used Book Sale

It takes a fair amount of work to get from pic-left to pic-right for the Columbus Day weekend Hyde Park Used Book Sale. Fortunately, that work is kinda fun and you're welcome to join in.  Contact info for volunteers is here, but I'll be sorting books on Monday evenings from 6pm until we run out of work-- usually about 8pm, I'd guess-- and you can just show up and help if you want.

If you can't sort books, be sure to stop in on Columbus Day weekend and buy some.  And if you have books to donate to us, that's wonderful.  Just throw them into the bin depicted above, located in the basement of Treasure Island, who's once again treating us very generously by donating space.  Proceeds go to the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference, where I've been a board member for most of the last five years.

Blinking at Compatible Partners

Like Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink collects anecdotes backed up by research, which is a pretty cool formula that bridges the personal to the scientific.  Blink examines our mental reflexes, our knee jerk perceptions and finds that many stand up quite well, so well that postponing decisions can be a waste of time.  Executing on instinct often serves us very well.

On the other hand, we have individual and shared prejudices that cloud our judgment.  For instance, we assume tall people make better leaders.  Gladwell cites the statistics showing that Fortune 500 executives are disproportionately tall.

But one research finding struck me personally.  Gladwell quoted a marital counseling expert who slim-slices videos of couples talking about issues that are difficult for them and he claims that 90% of the time he can figure out whether a couple be together ten years hence.  There are several things he looks for, but the worst relationship-killer is contempt, the rolling of eyes at your partner's concerns.  "Oh, no," I cried to myself.  "I show contempt for my loved ones all the time.  I made the right choice to stay single."

Then pretty much the next thing I did was sign up for Compatible Partners, the new separate but equal matchmaking site for gays & lesbians from the E-Harmony folks.  I figured it'd be a lark to try it out while it's free.  Nothing's come from it yet.  Most of the time, I get an e-mail notice that a match has been made but by the time I get around to checking the particulars, I find the other guy has closed off communications due to a "lack of chemistry", which is gayspeak for "not handsome enough". 

I'm not so hung up on looks as long as I get the sense the other person can comfortably walk a couple miles.  On the other hand, I'm still superficial in my own ways.  For instance, I don't think I could date a grown man named Skip unless he got the nickname coaching baseball.

The Stuff of Dreams & Theory

Yesterday, I talked a little about the advantages of electronic readers like the Kindle.  Online fiction reading is a growing market niche, but it's small and people are still generally reluctant wean themselves from paper versions of novels unless they really want one of the advantages I mentioned yesterday.

Still, electronic readers suffer from a disadvantage they won't always have.  At this point, probably all the novel-length fiction available on these readers was written with the paper book in mind.  If fiction were written with the Kindle in mind, the paper version would probably seem far less attractive.  And that brings up another question-- if novels were written for e-readers, how would they be different?

Well, I don't think an electronic novel would be so linear.  It'd be naturally post-modern.  Pages would abound with hyperlinks and multimedia pop-ups.  (The Choose Your Own Adventure series would work a lot better in an electronic format.)  Stories that go back and forth in time would be a fine fit for this format. 

It'd be easier to depict a character from multiple vantage points.  Say, you have character in your story named Jack Spicer.  When character James Withrow talks about Jack Spicer, there'd be a hyperlink on Jack's name that would take you to a page where Jack is talked about in mildly glowing terms.  Maybe you have another character named Peter Rossi.  When he's talking about Jack, there'd be a hyperlink taking you to a weird rant.

I'm hardly the best person to explore this new frontier, but why should I let that stop me?  I've begun a digital fiction project with the notion that life in Hyde Park is a pretty good backdrop.  The place abounds with interesting people so I figure I can base fictional characters on individual Hyde Parkers, dressed up with enough made-up stuff to create a certain plausible deniability.  (And I do honor the Texas code of rhetoric: don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.)

I'm calling my fiction project about HP The Stuff of Dreams & Theory, which literally came to me in a dream-- I woke up remembering that I'd been dreaming about eating at a sit-down Indian food place on 55th Street in "Kenpark".  I'm not sure about Kenpark for this fictional HP.  It violates the rules of linguistics, but that's what I'm using as a working location name.

In any case, at some point I hope to have enough for a working model of this experiment, which I'll share when I'm only slightly embarrassed about my work product.  Until then, I'd be happy to hear folks' suggestions.  I'm sure that somewhere out in cyberspace, someone has been discussing this idea and links to that would be helpful.

Electronic Books

I've been having an ongoing discussion with friends concerning the Kindle and other electronic books. I see it as inevitable, although I'm thinking the usurpation of paper books will happen gradually, over decades.  In fact, many of us, probably most of my audience here, do majority of their reading electronically.  You're reading electronically now, of course, unless you actually printed out this post to read offline.

Certain types of writing already have a cozy relationship with digital formats-- shorter pieces conveying contemporary information standing front & center.  Hence, the chaos in the newspaper industry as it adjusts to the web.  We're in a bright, shiny new age of maps.  Both hard & soft sciences are benefitting from a democratization of popular writing, as amateur experts publish quickly & cheaply with niche websites.

But fiction's a different story, so to speak.  Oh, we get short movie clips on Youtube and the length of songs seems to fit well with what the internet does best, but longer, novel-sized pieces are still a blip in the digital world.  The Kindle represents the strongest foray into digitizing novels and most people are shaking their heads at the idea of reading from an electonic device instead of the trusty paper book.

My friend Shannon Riordan blogged today about his recent facetime with a Kindle.  Some things he disliked, but here's what he considered better than paper:

A few of the features that stood out was the ability to obtain new books easily and anywhere (via download), the ability to "browse" books by being allowed to read the first chapter for free, a built-in dictionary, the ability to resize the font to one of several different sizes, built-in web browsing, the ability to highlight text, search for specific words in the book, create notes, subscribe to blogs, magazines, newspapers, and, of course, you can store well over 1000 books in something that weighs less than a pound...

The feature I liked most and worked most intuitively for me was the "search" feature - it's great to be able to search for a word or phrase in a book.  Want to know all the occurrences of Hugh D'Paynes in a Templar book?  *poof*  Done.  And done in context - it gives you the passage it occurs in, not just a page number (like in a glossary).

All true, but I think there's one more thing to consider about fiction & electronic books and I'll get to that tomorrow.  I promise there'll be a tangential relationship to Hyde Park, too.

The Code

To keep my mind off the cold, I've been reading a couple California writers who are new to me.

Nathanael West's Day of the Locust is considered one of the best novels about Hollywood and I have to admit it's a compelling tale, although West is kinda the Nelson Algren of Los Angeles.  In his stories, no one ever basks in the sun; the evil day star burns his characters from the outside-- between the bouts of drinking that burn up their inner lives.  And theology's no impediment, as this line from Miss Lonelyhearts suggests: "They had been arguing about the existence of God from midnight until dawn, and now, having run out of whisky, they decided to go to the market for some applejack." (p. 9)

In New York City in 1903, West was born Nathan von Wallenstein Weinstein, the oldest child of German-speaking Russian Jews from Lithuania.  He died in California when he was just 37, a victim of his own bad driving, apparently.  Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, graduated from Berkeley, but now lives in New York City.  Which of the two is more quintessentially Californian?

Powell's has the Everyman's Library collection of Didion's non-fiction for $15, which seems like quite the bargain.  I'm a hundred pages into it and I've been well-entertained so far.  In one story, she talks about going down to Mexico and meeting her idol John Wayne while they were shooting Henry Hathaway's The Sons of Katie Elder.

There was Wayne, working too soon, finishing the picture with a bad cold and racking cough, so tired by late afternoon that he kept an oxygen inhalator on the set.   And still nothing mattered but the Code. "That guy," he muttered of a reporter who incurred his displeasure.  "I admit I'm balding. I admit I got a tire around my middle. What man fifty-seven doesn't? Big news. Anyway, that guy."

He paused, about to expose the heart of the matter, the root of the distaste, the fracture of the rules that bothered him more than the alleged misquotations, more than the intimation that he was no longer the Ringo Kid.  "He comes down, uninvited, but I ask him over anyway. So we're sitting around drinking mescal out of a water jug."

He paused again and looked meaningfully at Hathaway, readying him for the unthinkable denouement. "He had to be assisted to his room."  (emphasis Didion's, p.35-6)

I've never been all that taken with Wayne's brand of mid-century machismo, which literally & figuratively pales beside the Latino version.  But that's a remarkably understated aspersion aimed at a lesser man, a breaker of the Code: "He had to be assisted to his room."  Nathanael West's fictional characters only aspire to such bravura, only wish they could keep a Code.  Any Code.

Community Homes-- Lost LA

I'm planning to a trip to Los Angeles and was reading up on architecture there.  During the 1950s, the region was growing by leaps & bounds and a few deveolopers & architects decided to focus on well-designed, more affordable housing.

A leading figure in this effort was Gregory Ain, who, in his youth, lived for a year in Llano del Rio, a socialist-inspired cooperative that for a brief period flourished in the Antelope Valley north of L.A., and later, as an architect, was impressed by the sensitively planned Baldwin Hills village.

With Simon Eisner as planner and Garrett Eckbo as landscape architect, Ain pursued the development of a 280-unit cooperative on 100 acres in the San Fernando Valley community of Reseda. The project, called Community Homes, was to be a model neighborhood, sensitively landscaped with parks, playgrounds, and plantings. But after years of planning the Federal Housing Administration denied the project financing.

It seems some of the potential homeowners were racial minorities. This was a violation of something called Regulation X which, out of fear that resale values would be harmed, prohibited federal funding for projects where there was a mixing of races. There were strong protests in which it was noted that many of the subscribers in question were veterans who fought in the war. All was in vain, and the plans were scrapped, with the land eventually falling into the hands of so-called "down and dirty" developers.

Architectural historian Esther McCoy commented in her chapter on Ain in The Second Generation, "Five years after community homes was disbanded and the property sold, Reseda was the lowest common non-dominator of tract housing-- no green belts or finger parks, just houses set row on row as exactly as markers in a VA cemetery. In the cemetery, however, there was no Regulation X."

(All from Sam Hall Kaplan's LA: Lost & Found, p.137)

Sometimes, reading history just makes me want to cry.  Here are some exterior photos in Ain's later Mar Vista tract.  And this page on the same website explains the thinking behind these homes.  And here's an interior series.  I stole the photo from this blog by a woman who remodelled her Ain house.

Petty Cheating in Gladwell's Outliers

I enjoyed reading Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, who's also written The Tipping Point and Blink. Gladwell argues in Outliers that our culture greatly affects the opportunities available to us and that success relies just as much on opportunities as it does on talent.  But Gladwell could just as easily have argued that violating social norms and petty cheating figure prominently in success.

Bill Joy, who's given credit for writing much of the underlying UNIX code, was a talented & driven college student. Not that grades figured prominently among his motivations; he was fanatical about programming, which was mostly extracurricular.  Timing was critical to his success-- he happened to be attending the University of Michigan in 1971 when that school jumped out to a leader in the field of computation.  And competition wasn't cheap.  Students were limited by the rules to just a certain amount of computer time which Joy & friends got around by hacking the process. (Outliers, p.45-6)

Bill Gates was obsessed with programming at an even earlier age and Gladwell quotes him talking about what early computing experiences at the firm of a friend's mom (Outliers, p.52-3):

"We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week when we couldn't that we wouldn't get 20 or 30 hours in. There was a period where Paul Allen and I got in trouble for stealing a bunch of passwords and crashing the system. We got kicked out. I didn't get to use the computer the whole summer.  This is when I was 15 and 16. Then I found out Paul had found a computer that was free at the University of Washington. They had these machines in the medical center in the physics department. They were on a 24-hour schedule, but with this big slack period, so that between three and six in the morning they never scheduled anything." Gates laughed. "I'd leave at night, after my bedtime. I could walk up to the University of Washington fromr my house. Or I'd take the bus. That's why I'm always so generous to the University of Washington, because they let me steal so much computer time."  (Years later, Gates's mother said, "We always wondered why it was so hard for him to get up in the morning.")

This petty cheating is hardly confined to computer programming, of course. My friend Nathan sent me this link to Werner Herzog explaining why he stole his first movie camera. These gray areas ranging from illegal activity to cheating to violating social norms are complicated and it's not always easy to draw a line between what's ultimately harmful or helpful to society.  

Hyde Park Book Sale

The book sale has gone very well, with gorgeous weather Saturday and Sunday.  I haven't gotten word on the daily tallies, yet, but the shopping center courtyard has been packed when not just merely busy.  Even so, it seems like more quality books have survived into late Sunday afternoon than usual.  Fiction is still pretty strong, with the Mystery section especially bountiful. 

On Monday, it's $4 for a bag of books and $5 for a box of books-- and you can bring your own box.  Hours are 9am to 4pm.  All proceeds go to the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference.

And again, many thanks to Treasure Island, which has been super.  They gave us space to store & sort the books and plenty of boxes to transport & display them.