Racial Shift in a Progressive City Spurs Talks:

Not every neighborhood in this city is one of those Northwest destinations where passion for espresso, the environment and plenty of exercise define the cultural common ground. A few places are still described as frontiers, where pioneers move because prices are relatively reasonable, the location is convenient and, they say, they “want the diversity.”

As new development drives up the price of real estate in northeast Portland, Ore., many longtime residents of the Alberta Street area have sold property and moved away. More Photos >

Yet one person’s frontier, it turns out, is often another’s front porch. It has been true across the country: gentrification, which increases housing prices and tension, sometimes has racial overtones and can seem like a dirty word. Now Portland is encouraging black and white residents to talk about it, but even here in Sincere City, the conversation has been difficult.

“I’ve been really upset by what I perceive to be Portland’s blind spot in its progressivism,” said Khaela Maricich, a local artist and musician. “They think they live in the best city in the country, but it’s all about saving the environment and things like that. It’s not really about social issues. It’s upper-middle-class progressivism, really.”

Ms. Maricich, 33, who is white, spoke after attending this month’s meeting of Portland’s Restorative Listening Project.

The goal of the project, which is sponsored by the city’s Office of Neighborhood Involvement, is to have white people better understand the effect gentrification can have on the city’s longtime black and other-minority neighborhoods by having minority residents tell what it is like to be on the receiving end.

Once armed with a broader perspective, said Judith Mowry, the project’s leader, whites should “make the commitment that the harm stops with us.” That might mean that whites appeal to the city to help black businesses or complain to companies that put fliers on the doors of black property owners encouraging them to sell.

Yet what has been clear from the meetings this month and last is that talking about the impact of gentrification is easier than finding ways to reduce it. For some minority residents, the notion that white Portland now says it feels their pain is cold comfort.

“That’s been our history,” Norma Trimble, who is Native American, said during the question-and-answer session this month. “They take all you’ve got. They take your land. Now they want your stories.”

Posting’s been on hiatus while I’ve been setting up, at long last, website stuff. Also working on a comic book. Also finding a new job. Also working a full time job with a long commute that’s gotten longer because Trimet keeps getting worse (three MAX breakdowns I get stuck in in May alone!). Also having a life (really this is my cover story for what I’m doing when reading somewhere not on my commute or downtime at work).

UN to Stop Food Distribution in Gaza Monday Due to Fuel Shortage. (Title is from article. For those not keeping track, this “Monday” of which they speak? That’d be today. For the click-wary: the fuel shortages are due to Israeli cutbacks intended “to pressure Palestinian militants to stop rocket attacks on southern Israel.”)

And this tribute to Keith Haring, whose 50th birthday would have been yesterday:

Polygamous-sect hearing in Texas descends into farce

SAN ANGELO, Texas – A court hearing to decide the fate of the 416 children swept up in a raid on a West Texas polygamous sect descended into farce Thursday, with hundreds of lawyers in two packed buildings shouting objections and the judge struggling to maintain order…

…At issue was an attempt by the state of Texas to strip the parents of custody and place the children in foster homes because of evidence they were being physically and sexually abused or in imminent danger of abuse by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a renegade Mormon splinter group suspected of forcing underage girls into marriage with older men…

…The judge must weigh the allegations of abuse and also decide whether it is in the children’s best interest to be placed into mainstream society after they have been told all their lives that the outside world is hostile and immoral.

It’s an AP article, hence the “quality”. Still, that that last paragraph I quoted is in the article has me wondering what its readers may come away asking that they may not have before. Alan posts on this over at Poly in the Media.

Okay, more important stuff time.

Colony Collapse Disorder is not new, but I haven’t posted on it yet (here or at the old journal). The very very short version: bees are dying off, very very quickly! Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium has a news update page here, although it’s not been updated in a few months.

Also, salmon and other sea critters dying off isn’t too new either, but here’s a decent LA Times article analyzing the situation in context of the last decade.. From the same paper, salmon fishing banned this year. Looks like this isn’t the year to try making lox myself.

Meanwhile, it’s time for the 14th Annual Soy Symposium. I’m not a big fan of Soyfoods; they’re an excellent example of a company that preys on people. (Joy Out of Soy is a good article analyzing the promotion and critiques of soy, although it’s a bit dated [May 2000].)

On soy, corn, wheat and cotton growth in the US, from the New York Times: Food Prices Rise, Farmers Respond.

Oh, by the way? WHEAT IS DYING OFF.

Meanwhile, out here in Oregon, the last two weeks have seen 80ºF weather (complete with bees!) and snow.

Okay, more more important stuff.

Sludge fertilizer program spurs concerns

BALTIMORE – Scientists using federal grants spread fertilizer made from human and industrial wastes on yards in poor, black neighborhoods to test whether it might protect children from lead poisoning in the soil. Families were assured the sludge was safe and were never told about any harmful ingredients.

Nine low-income families in Baltimore row houses agreed to let researchers till the sewage sludge into their yards and plant new grass. In exchange, they were given food coupons as well as the free lawns as part of a study published in 2005 and funded by the Housing and Urban Development Department…

…In a 1978 memo, the EPA said sludge “contains nutrients and organic matter which have considerable benefit for land and crops” despite the presence of “low levels of toxic substances.”

But in the late 1990s the government began underwriting studies such as those in Baltimore and East St. Louis using poor neighborhoods as laboratories to make a case that sludge may also directly benefit human health.

Meanwhile, there has been a paucity of research into the possible harmful effects of heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, other chemicals and disease-causing microorganisms often found in sludge.

Yet again, economically fuxored PoC used as guinea pigs, blatantly lied to in the process. Dear HUDD, why not save yourselves the Enormous Burden of distributing lawns and food coupons and test that sludge on some lawns out in Beverly Hills? (Oh right, the lawns won’t see kids playing or food being grown, thus defeating the purpose of the testing…but oh, the possibility of those things happening and putting economically privileged white folks at risk!)

(Pointed to the article by Black Amazon, of course, in another post about the recent madness directed at her and BrownFemiPower by Seal Press, WAM, and a great many white feminists. Also linked is An Open Letter to the White Feminist Community.)

I’ll be hiding under my bed, thankyouverymuch. (Okay, actually, I’ll be finishing up some work on the Stumptown Comics Fest and storyboarding an animation, because I still do believe that art will save the world. But if my bed were higher off the ground, I’d be doing art from under there, I guarantee it.)

Not mine.

On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam

Well I have and in fact
more than one and I’ll
tell you this too

I wrote one against
Algeria that nightmare
and another against

Korea and another
against the one
I was in

and I don’t remember
how many against
the three

when I was a boy
Abyssinia Spain and
Harlan County

and not one
breath was restored
to one

shattered throat
mans womans or childs
not one not

one
but death went on and on
never looking aside

except now and then
with a furtive half-smile
to make sure I was noticing.

— Hayden Carruth

pity this busy monster, manunkind

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
— electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born — pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if — listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go

— E. E. Cummings

(Text gratefully c+ped from The Wondering Minstrels database.)

Yesterday I cut my hair. I’ve been cutting my own hair for years. I wrote a poem once about how I kept shaving my head bald, that that kept being the constant in my life even as everything else of me changed. Sometimes I’d cut it into a mohawk, when it didn’t interfere with employment, but at a certain point I realized it was interfering with things beyond my own ability to have a job and I stopped. (The linked article also references dreadlocks but with an inaccurate history; Wikipedia, of course. However, their Afrocentricity in the US is still critical.)

Then I began growing out my hair again.

This was partly gender reclamation: in trying to escape gender definition I restrained all of my body that i could, concealed classic gender markers, subscribed wholesale to the theory of androgyny as absence.

It was partly ethnic reclamation: my hair flags me as Jewish. It is curly and frizzy and wavy and does its own thing. I should listen to it more often.

For a while I trimmed it into a fat-hawk, which (especially since I still wore my hair down) I considered distant enough from the mohawk; I appreciated the gender-non-specificity of the hairstyle.

Then I began growing out my hair again.

During this time I got a job for which I interviewed as a woman except when at the second interview I came out as transgendered with a preference for male pronouns and who cares if people are confused. I fingerbrushed my longer hair to cover the inch-long hair at the sides, and generally that shorter hair wouldn’t poke out, except that sometimes it did. More recently, at fivish inches and with the way my hair curls and splays, it was definitely poking out like I’d been cutting gum out of my hair.

I don’t trust hairdressers in this straight-hair town. I went to the Safeway the other day, again foolishly thinking I might find a decent hair product. At seven in the morning, everyone wants to help you. Straight blond hair walks up with that offer and I say, no thanks, you wouldn’t know. She pushes. I say, I’m looking for shampoo that actually works with curly hair. She says oh, you’re looking to straighten it?

Okay, she’s not a hairdresser. Still, before I started cutting my own hair I had one count ‘em one good hair-cutting experience with the scissors in someone else’s hands, at a Supercuts surprisingly enough. This leads me to wonder if somewhere there’s also a magical Starbucks with good coffee.

I’m at one of those new beginning points, just in general, and those usually entail a physical manifestation of change in the form of cutting hair. I’ve got wonky flaps of hair poking through the hang-over from the top of my head; nothing about me can be contained, can it? I do not want to cut off all my hair. I grab my hair-trimming scissors, the ones I used to use to clean up my sideburns and now that I let those grow free I just use to trim my goatee, and I begin cutting.

I learn things as I cut. It’s the first time I’ve cut away to discover what was there, rather than to find my own head.

My hair is now mostly cut short, the top down to mid-ear and underneath fading down. It poofs out, which is why for so long I feared having this hair. It’s a very different gender read. The exception is two long clomps in the front, framing my face; these are an odd amalgamation of my history. In middle school I’d pull a couple clumps like this, much smaller, decorating the tops which snap-on rhinestones. They looked more like antennae then.

As I continue to struggle with getting my hair to look like I haven’t been rubbing the top of my head against a carpet, I’ve got fabulous scarves. Wearing one in a thinner band with the long strands out front, these portions look like payos.

Happy Purim.

I’ve been sticking to fair-trade chocolate, which means I’m tending towards carob instead because I’m still working on the rolling-in-money machine. Last night I was fussing over a munchie type snack when I realized carob + allspice + nutmeg would be awesome in cookies. As many people who have been told that carob can be used as a substitute for chocolate know, that’s a load of crap. They taste different. They are different. And they are both delicious.

So off I went in search of a chocolate chip cookie recipe to modify, as my standard one uses oatmeal and I didn’t want that. After giggling over the Engineer’s Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe that I’d forgotten and the McGyver version that I hadn’t seen, I opted for this vanilla-free recipe (because I was out of vanilla and wasn’t sure how crucial it was as a flavor in other recipes).

My modified version:

Ingredients
• 5/6 cup sugar
• 5/6 cup packed brown sugar (this and the above – I forgot that I don’t have a quarter cup measure till after I’d already used the third cup measure in it’s place. The cookies survived)
• 1 cup butter
• 1 large egg
• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (quarter cup estimated instead of measuring in tablespoons)
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• Pinch of salt
• 1 tablespoon allspice (we had Jamaican allspice…yummy)
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg (amounts of these spices approximate, as I was experimenting and possibly forgot to measure)
• 1 1/2 cups carob chips (you can use more but it’s what I had)

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees if you are like me and forget to follow the recipe you’re theoretically working from, although the original 375 would probably work fine too. Mix sugar, brown sugar, butter and egg in mixer or by hand. Remember to let butter warm first…hah hah I’m so professional. Stir in flour, baking soda, and spices. The dough will be very stiff. Stir in carob chips. Make small 2-tablespoon-ish dough lumps 2 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until light brown. The centers will be soft. Place on wire rack. Attempt to not burn your mouth by allowing them to cool before being eaten.

I have a thing for shoes that I don’t tend to indulge due to having finicky feet, a limited budget, limited opportunity or excuse to wear anything beyond my basic boots (currently a lucky like-new Goodwill find of 16-eye double-zip Docs while I attempt to repair my Corcorans and hopefully paint them pink) and this thing about not wanting to have a lot of crap, even if it’s superfabulous crap. My recent addiction to Shoewawa is probably a sign of at least a limited opening up to at least exploring this love of mine. H is not helping; they’ve been getting full-fledged back into fashion, and I’m loving flipping through the magazines, despite all the diet-cookie-cutter models with grumpy SoHip (TM) frowns.

But Shoewawa i found, unsurprisingly enough, while on a search for boots, fabulous boots. For me fabulous tends to mean either Victorian-influenced or obscenely flashy, and since I was in the mood for the latter in particular I googled “ugly boots”. Other than a kajillion results for Uggs, which have never really been my style but I love how some people pull them off (perhaps if I found some in hot pink?), there were a number of good results, including the aforementioned new addiction. That said, it’s their Ugly Shoes section that wins it for me; where the rest of the blog is either for basic classics (who cares?) or atrocities like this:

The ugly shoe section has amazing things like this:

Okay, that section’s got some atrocities as well. But I’m way biased: give me over-the-top, trashy, glamtastic, too-much-glitter boots anyday. Not that I’ll wear them everyday, but, you know, I’d look at ‘em. Willingly.

My doctor’s name is Suzanne. She works from an office that has two receptionists named Sue.

Hilarity ensues.

Well, not really, but their ads in my gmail are entertaining:

Red Lotus Clothing

Discover a New Brand, New You Urban Style, Vintage Feel Shop Now!
www.redlotusclothing.com

Female To Male Surgery

Find great deals and save! Compare products, prices & stores
www.Shopping.com

Learn Chinese

Have a business advantage. Live teachers from Beijing.
www.chinesevoice.com

Male To Female Hormones

Bargain Prices. Smart Deals. Save on Male To Female Hormones!
Shopzilla.com

WeAreHapa.com

Social network for multi-cultural individuals – friends, photos, blog
www.wearehapa.com

About these links

It makes me want to dress up as a door-to-door Bible salesman and fashion consultant for Halloween. Does that make me a bad Jew/queer/revolutionary in general?

God, I hope so.

So done with Livejournal, although I’ll still wind up using it for communities and the like a bit.