Saw this photo today, titled “Autumn in Chicagoland” –

David Quinn took the photo “in the Palatine or Rolling Meadows suburbs” of Chicago. It reminded me immediately of Jason Lazarus’s photograph “Standing at the Grave of Emmett Till, Day of Exhumation, June 1st, 2005 (Alsip, IL)” –

I think both photographs capture something uncanny about Chicago’s suburban spaces. Both show a scar through manicured, humanless landscapes that look remarkably like backyards. One is a golf course, the other is a cemetery.

This post is long overdue and too brief. I arrived in Cambridge, England just about two weeks ago to begin an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History at, of course, the University of Cambridge. The program(me) has both taught and research components, though the focus is largely on the student’s research. This will be a substantial change from what I got used to as an undergraduate, but it’s a welcome one. I would write ad nauseum about what I’ll be researching ad nauseum, but the program has an evaluation scheme whereby papers are read without knowing the authors, and any tips as to who will be writing what are unwelcome. So, in the interest of academic integrity, and most likely in the reader’s general interest as well, I’ll keep my work to myself for now.

The first thing that needs to be said is that the weather has been remarkably nice since I’ve arrived. This really is a big deal since most days out of the year the United Kingdom is a dim, wet place. I’m housed in one of the livelier and more diverse parts of Cambridge: Mill Road. There are lots of “ethnic” or “international” restaurants and groceries on Mill Road, including the local Al Amin grocery, whose owner, Abdul Arain is running for chancellor of Cambridge against Lord Sainsbury, the heir-apparent and owner of one of the UK’s largest supermarket chains.

Also of note in my neighborhood is CB 1 – the world’s first internet cafe! Some have joked that it also may be the last. Regardless, it’s one of the nicer places to read in Cambridge. And since the libraries close here around 7 pm, having a good cafe nearby that’s open late is important.

I’ll have to make some more comments later about the college system, its perpetuation of structural inequalities, and the dispersion of administration that sets Cambridge pretty far apart from American universities as institutions.

I started rewatching Friday Night Lights recently and have been taking notice how the show’s story changes over the course of the five seasons. I haven’t given energy to plot or character changes, but I have noticed how the show changes its portrayal of the very site and origin of the Panthers/Lions tale: Dillon, Texas.

One of the central themes of the show is how hard-working, good-hearted women and men overcome the very basic and ingrained adversity of their circumstances. Matt Saracen rises to the challenge and leads his team to a state championship, despite having no immediate leaders in his family life. Tim Riggins time and time again pushes aside his inner demons and does the right thing. And most extremely, Vince Howard transforms himself from Another Young Black Criminal to the virtuous leader of his family and team. He becomes the man he always was on the inside. This is the story of Friday Night Lights–that individuals can overcome their class and race positions, their poor upbringing, in short, whatever shit they were born into–and I think it is a good one.

But this is what makes the subtle change in the show’s portrayal of Dillon interesting. As the site of most of the characters’ adversities–and it’s a refrain among the characters that if they could just get out of Dillon, they would leave all these difficulties behind–it’s interesting to see the show shift from portraying the Dillon landscape as depressed, isolating, and ex-urban to bright, nurturing, and more rural.

The best measure of the show’s portrayal of place are the scene setting shots of Dillon from a moving vehicle. They work almost like intertitles.

Here are some from Season One:

And here are some from Season Five:

In this last shot, the dialogue is actually:

Becky: It’s so pretty out here.

Luke: I used to hate it here. My whole life I figured football was gonna take me outta here. I couldn’t imagine staying around here…but…I guess I better try to imagine it.

Becky: I have an amazing imagination.

…

Luke: You ever think you could imagine living on a farm?

Becky: Sure.

Luke and Becky are talking about staying in Dillon. Furthermore, one of the last shots of the final season is of Tim and Billy Riggins building a house in Dillon at sunset. It’s almost as if we’ve witnessed the transformation of the town from a place of adversity and disadvantage to a place of redemption and hope. It certainly has transformed from a place of escape to one of return.

Which is interesting for two reasons:

1) This narrative affirms the logic of nostalgia which is so critically examined in the first season, as well as in the movie and book.

2) This dulls the show’s social comment that the adversity these characters face may be caused by the place, i.e. the social, political, and economic circumstances that these characters are in. In this very small way, by dissociating the town of Dillon, Texas from the institutional difficulties the characters face, the show seems to be removing their adversity from larger societal trends, such as racism, classism, or discrepancies in education.

The other day I took a ride through a relatively new sub-division next to the neighborhood where my parents live. This new sub-division is called Nassau Grove and it’s built and designed by the national housing chain K. Hovnanian, from New Jersey.

It’s a really strange place. To begin with, the name doesn’t make too much sense. There is a tiny municipality called Nassau (an old train depot, I think) near present-day Nassau Grove, but there’s no grove as far as I know. The sub-division has followed the usual pattern of Sussex county development: farms to modular homes.

This is “Nassau Grove” ten years ago:

This is Nassau Grove today:

My dad refers to Nassau Grove as “Pleasantville,” and it is actually quite striking how unreal the place is. For one, all the streets are named after French wines: Grenache Ct, Chablis Ln, Nouveau Ave, uzw. But more importantly, it’s not clear who actually lives in Nassau Grove. K. Hovnanian built most of the houses in one go, assuming they would sell without any trouble. Then the recession hit, and modular homes that were selling in the “upper 500s” (as advertised) are now in the “lower 200s.” Most of the homes are unoccupied, and I find myself doing a double take whenever I see someone sitting on a porch or walking down Anjou Ct.

Aside from taking the place of a local farm and adding congestion to Sussex County’s poorly planned road network, places like Nassau Grove are mostly harmless (though there are plenty of cases of local landowners getting swindled by developers and selling their land for about 10% of its actual value). However, I think that the rapid development of Sussex County has wrought some more subtle cultural damage that is harder to notice.

The sense of community in Lewes and Rehoboth is now highly ambiguous. Growing up it felt quite coherent, if prejudiced and exclusive. Take as an example a single beach called the naval jetty.

Growing up, the naval jetty was a part of the beach few people went to. It was a bit out of the way compared to the main Cape Henlopen and Rehoboth beaches of the area, and it has lots of obstructions in the water and sand that make it a bit more dangerous. But, it had a nice break, so lots of people went there to surf. You could count on meeting someone you knew there, and more than once as a kid my parents just dropped me off at the beach, assuming that I’d be able to get a ride home with someone’s folks.

Nowadays, if you go down to the naval jetty you’ll see the beach packed with tourists, and some accompanying graffiti like “NO KOOKS” or “GO BACK TO PA.” I appreciate the defensive sentiment, but I think it’s coming from a confused place. I was down at the naval jetty the other day, waiting in the line-up with about a million other people, when I was told to “get off the locals’ beach” by a middle-aged man who I happened to know was a dentist from upstate with a beach house in Lewes.

As an actual local, I was initially pretty upset with this jerk, but soon grew confused over what sort of circumstances would give someone permission to behave like this. I realized that the local population, and any claim to local-legitimacy, was so radically in flux because of the massive population growth and radical socio-economic change in the area, that it’s basically a total free-for-all in the arena of who-is-who in the rapidly changing rural-to-exurban Sussex County.

Because the category of local is so radically in question, and so many are making various types of claims to it, I think the only appropriate category in action now is the neo-local.

It’s weird.

After years of making due with generously donated but poorly fitting bikes, I finally have a steed to call my own: a Salsa Casseroll. I was looking for an affordable road bike that could do long rides comfortably and would stand up in all seasons and conditions. I was initially drawn to the Surly Pacer, which I’ve read is an outstanding bike (and comes in sick racing green!), but I quickly became enamored with the new Salsa Casseroll.

The Casseroll is “a relaxed road bike,” which means a solid steel frame with more traditional road geometry, but a slightly extended head tube, 32 cm tires, and a sweet included front rack for out-of-the-box randonneuring. I decided on the Casseroll over a more traditional road bike because I’m hoping to do some longer rides and maybe one day a few centuries. I know I felt joint and back fatigue acutely during longer rides in the past on my more aggressively configured bikes, and was looking for a more sustainable way of riding farther.

So far I am extremely pleased with the Casseroll. I won’t be winning any races with these tires and my upright posture, but I’ve been able to cruise at a healthy clip for a while without feeling stress anywhere but my thigh muscles. You can still sprint efficiently, and the generous drops let you get quite low and wide for fast descents and powering through corners. It’s a really versatile bike. I’ve taken it on gravel paths without a second thought. My real ”I’m happy I own a Casseroll” moment came the other night when I was just pedaling around the neighborhood and went off exploring in an unfinished sub-development with a mix of paved and unpaved roads. I didn’t have to worry about the bike at all; I was carefree. I’m sure anyone with a solid hybrid or mountain bike will have this same experience, but on the Casseroll, I could quickly ride the two paved miles home without breaking a sweat.

To add to the large collection of posts praising the move from WordPress to Jekyll: I moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll today. I’m a very slow worker, a ruminator (as my mom tells me), prone to idiotic syntax errors, and it still only took me a few hours to install Jekyll, build some templates, and migrate my old stuff. Now, this blog is flying free courtesy of GitHub and Jekyll.

Why did I switch platforms? Mostly because I wanted to learn something new. GitHub is an incredibly useful tool, and I wanted to familiarize myself with the workflow of versioning, testing locally, and deploying that more applications-oriented development requires. Using Jekyll is actually a great introduction to git and GitHub.

The student’s perspective aside, what is the advantage of Jekyll over WordPress? Well, for my needs I prefer Jekyll’s smaller size, more intuitive templating process, and simple layout. I have to prepare myself each time I start a new WordPress project and begin contorting the default theme to my needs. Perhaps my approach is all wrong, but I end up wading through and cutting loose most of what WordPress prepackages when I make the relatively simple sites I do.

Jekyll doesn’t break down the main page into six (or seven?) component PHP files or anything like that. You have your default page template, which lets you put, in plain old HTML, whatever you’d like around your content, and you have your post template, which lets you add HTML or dynamic elements you’d like into your individual posts. Jekyll is basically a text to HTML engine, so the idea is to configure how you’d like your posts to be HTMLed.

Herein lies the benefit and limit of Jekyll when compared to WordPress. WordPress is extremely extendable, can handle multiple different types of content, and has a very nice off-the-shelf backend. It is an extremely capable CMS, but may be a bit too hefty for a simple little blog. It’s way bigger than Jekyll, which makes it more versatile, but a little less useable for simple applications like this one.

I still think WordPress is great. It’s amazing software. And free! And everyone uses it, so there are tons of neat WP things out there, as well as lots of excellent documentation and support. But, for those of you just blogging, and who are not into Tumblr, Posterous, Blogspot, etc., give Jekyll a try.

To get Jekyll going for free on GitHub, you’ll need to know HTML, CSS, and a little bit of Git. They’re all worth learning.

This is Jekyll’s “CMS”! It’s great! It’s a folder on your computer!

I’m not sure how I feel about how people use the word “hipster” – it seems to be a pretty essentialist pejorative that has a lot of dangers lurking behind it – but I think often when people use the word they are actually referring to a complex and deep historical phenomenon of the European middle-class. Maybe we’re better off using the word Bildungsbürgertum?

The concrete sociopolitical embodiment of the idea of a self-regulating aesthetic society was the so called Bildungsbürgertum, the "educated middle classes," who, although excluded from the exercise of serious forms of independent political power virtually everywhere, used their purported possession of a cultivated faculty of aesthetic judgment, their taste, to legitimize the retention of a certain socially privileged postion. Membership in this group, the Bildungsbürgertum, was not supposed to be guaranteed by noble birth, inherited wealth, or economic success, but was to be granted by the free recognition of one's (good) taste on the part of others who were themselves in a postion to judge. The Bildungsbürgertum was a self-coopting group whose collective good taste was a tacit warrant (almost) of moral superiority. (Raymond Geuss, Kultur, Bildung, Geist)

It might be a good idea to take note of the Bildungsbürgertum and the history of the aesthetics of the middle-class since we have the 19th century European middle-class to thank for a number of things: from museums to kitsch. Just sayin’, if we’re going to pass judgement on something, let’s make sure we know what exactly it is first.

I’m just diving into Rails (great tutorials on Ruby here, on Rails here and here) and ran into a very small bump in the road this morning that some Mac users might have. It’s an easy problem to troubleshoot, but I thought I would put my Google findings in one place for anyone who is also running into this issue.

Apparently the version of Ruby that ships with Snow Leopard has some trouble compiling and also is a bit older so can’t support Rails 3. You can deal with this by installing multiple versions of Ruby on your machine using Ruby Version Manager (RVM). There are some very straightforward installation instructions on RVM’s site, but for Mac users there are a few extra steps you’ll need to do to tell your machine where RVM is, and to tell it how to find RVM, and consequently which version of Ruby you choose, each time you open Terminal.

First you’ll want to install RVM from Terminal by running

You’ll then have to tell Terminal where to find RVM by running

This will tell Terminal where to find RVM for this session you’re in, but to tell Terminal to find RVM each time you open a shell, you’ll have to add it permanently to your .bash_profile. If, like me, you don’t have a .bash_profile (Terminal doesn’t create one for you by default), no worries. Just create one by typing

to create the file and edit it using any old text editor or run

to open it in Text Editor. Add our line

to .bash_profile, save it, and now Terminal will know where to find RVM each time you start a new session.

So, now you’ve downloaded some exciting new versions of Ruby using RVM. Want to use one by default? RVM can do that for you, too. Just run

and now you’re humming along on Ruby 1.9.2 (if you have installed it, of course). Check it by running

Most of this I learned from this post. It has some more helpful info, so check it out if you have any questions.

After careful consideration, I think it is very important that
we throw a raging kegger. These being the final days of our
formative years, the opportunities to get wildly drunk and act
with utter disregard and abandon will be fewer and fewer
until, god forbid, we become respectable people. Further, it
is commonly known that the typical Uchicago party is wanting
in spirit and verve; by throwing a raging kegger we can buck
this pervasive and unhealthy trend. I have been to many
parties where people were simply too sober and, though I
enjoyed the party, I came away thinking that it would be
really great if everyone were just a bit crazier and yes,
sloppier.

I think a keg is important for facilitating the atmosphere
necessary for a raging kegger. Kegs are also cheaper than a
comparable quantity of cans or bottles. Most people prefer
draft beer to other sorts of beer. While its true, kegs are a
hassle, the increased effort will be worth the cost

Beer pong is also an important aspect of a raging kegger. I
know that it is not in vogue on our campus. In fact, a great
stigma seems to be attached towards the activity. However,
beer pong is a fun activity that encourages a friendly spirit
of competition. Yes, beer pong is messy, but parties are
generally messy (even if they're not raging keggers). Our
floors need a good mopping anyway; we should resolve to mop
Sunday afternoon regardless of how messy the party gets.

I understand that a raging kegger may seem garrulous and
fratty. However, considering our well known and well defined
personalities combined with our equally well established
credentials as non-frat people, I suspect most recipients of
the e-mail invitation will understand our conscientious use of
the phrase and find it ironic and entirely consistent with our
personalities and m.o. Since we will, in fact, be throwing a
raging kegger, we get to have our cake and eat it too.

Respectfully disagreeing with ---, I think there is a
difference between BYOB and "contributions welcome." In my
experience, BYOB is code for "there won't be much alcohol"
while "contributions welcome" has a meaning more akin to: "be
a good person; help us defray the cost of the party." In
general, there have been far too many potluck style
house-parties lately and not enough instances of old fashioned
hospitality.

I welcome discussion on any of the matters above. I think its [sic]
important we're all together and committed to the vision of
our party, regardless of what that vision ends up being. It
is important we have a clear idea of said vision in the
immediate future so we can get an invite out. As far as
discussion goes, I think its important that we don't regard a
tame, traditional apartment party as the status quo by which
alternatives (namely the raging kegger) must prove themselves
superior, but rather hold to each option equally rigorous
standards of justification.

The title sequence of Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life is pretty stunning:

And in case you wanted that font.

As Scott has already put it, after a whirlwind six days, an excellent team of most righteous dudes - Harper Reed, Dylan Richard, Scott VanDenPlas, Aaron Salmon, and Scott Robbin - put together a great site for Rahm’s transition team. In record time, they conceptualized, wrote, tested, and finally overcame a most inopportune App Engine fail to launch Chicago2011.org to a warm reception.

It was a great experience and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have worked with such excellent people. And, importantly, Chicago2011.org is doing quite well. We’ve had a good number of visitors so far, and users have submitted some pretty excellent proposals on the Interact tool.

I’ll be excited to keep working on this project and seeing how far it can go.