Cleveland Uber Alles

Untimely Dispatches from the Neighborhood of the Unrepresented & Inarticulate; Anecdotes that Pedal and Coast Through the Boot-Print of 20th Century American Urbanism

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Campbell on Defensive is No Candidate for Cleveland Uber Alles Via Callahan's Cleveland Diary is this press release from "Campbell for Cleveland" in reaction to a poll that shows Frank Jackson ahead by 20%:

This evening Channel 3 will broadcast the results of theirrecent poll... The results they will broadcast are fallacious. Jackson 54 -Campbell 34 and here's why. The demographics which should be 50/50 east and west and 50/50black and white are: 61% east 54 % black 15% seniors 60 % under 49. The senior number is ridiculous. Seniors and over 50 year oldsare the largest voting blocks [sic]. Our internal poll completed last week showed the race dead even.
So, if one is to believe Campbell or her supporters' version of the demographic breakdown of the city she represents, then it's an even split, 50-50 between blacks and whites. Not only is this claim demonstrably false, with whites representing 41.5% of the city's population and minorities representing the other 58.5%, it also suggests that in pursuit of Campbell retaining the privilege of representing this majority minority city, she or her supporters are willing to engage in the worse kind of race baiting, as in, "You can't trust a poll that weights its sample with respondents from the east (i.e. blacks) and samples too many blacks. Don't you worry, Campbell supporters, White Cleveland (most of which is old, ready to die in its little crackerbox homes on the far West Side) will come out and save you from the black menace of a Jackson administration." This is ugly stuff--the sort of subtle racist spinning that usually gets Republicans elected--and Cleveland Uber Alles condemns it for it is. Now, if only some reasons to vote for Jackson would make themselves clear. An aside: why aren't any of our "young professionals" running for an upstart Green or Libertarian party, threatening to put up windmills on all of the Euclid corridor's vacant lots or something?

Monday, October 24, 2005

On the Failures of Our Fourth Estate: If Jackson is "Still an Enigma," then It's only Because the PD Won't Bother to Give Us the Answer As it is the province of pages like this one to play "armchair" reporter, Cleveland Uber Alles will, perhaps frequently, perhaps occasionally, sully itself with the dull and all too often snarky business of criticizing the journalistic standards and practices of The Plain Dealer and our Alt-Weekly Mega-Conglomerates and Alt-Weekly Mega-Conglomerate wannabees. Today, let's look at a long, Just-Who-Is-The-Candidate?-type piece that ran in Sunday's PD. Now this wasn't the most horrendous sort of the genre--you know, like the NY Times article that wasted our time with a description of how John Kerry prefers his Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches--but it was a prime example of an article filled with moments when a reporter failed to provide necessary context and/or simply failed to ask necessary questions. Cleveland Uber Alles doubts that Frank Jackson, or any Cleveland politician for that matter, has the kind of lights-out charisma that shuts off a reporter's critical faculties, and it doubts, too, that a piece like this lacked the sufficient time between assignment and deadline to allow the reporter to get away with such, with all due respect to Atrios, a craptacular handling of her subject matter. But, well, whatever happened, happened. And anyone hoping for some real insight on whether Jackson derserves their vote is left with this sad, sad over simplification about him: he's pro-neighborhood, anti-downtown development; his adherence to some abstract (if not nonexistent) "loyalty code" from the streets is either a) what makes him an authentic representative of the people of Cleveland or b) likely to engage the most odious kinds of patronage (Hiring a friend as "a consultant" to allow her to avoid the city's public employee residency requirement; lobbying with friends at City Hall to get constituents off the hook for their building code violations. Oh, the questions that PD reporters Olivera Perkins and Mark Naymik should have asked: like how much "consulting" has former Plain Dealer editor Maxine Greer actually done for the city? What makes her so important to the city council, beyond her friendship with Jackson, that there was some justification in hiring her in a way that would allow for the residency requirement to be waived? Did Jackson himself (who appears to have been interviewed for the article) believe that there was any conflict between this hiring and his "neighborhoods first" philosophy? I guess we'll never know. And what about the people whom Jackson helped avoid building code violation citations? How many of them were his ward's long suffering home owners? How many were landlords and developers who should have been forced to pay, for their tenants own good? We'll never know--at least not in the Cleveland that the PD would give us. Consider this offending passage from the article:

For his first two years as council president, Jackson thought Campbell adhered to his code [i.e. "Don't lie. Deliver on promises."]

Ultimately, though, Jackson decided that Campbell was dishonest. He says today that she lied to him about a lot of issues, but the one that infuriates him is the law that requires contractors on big projects to hire residents. Early in his career he made a promise that residents would get work on projects the city pays for.

Campbell publicly supported the law, but when the federal government threatened to withdraw money for projects if the law was enforced, Campbell opted not to enforce it. Jackson said Campbell did not tell him of her decision. He saw her behavior as a betrayal. Of him. Of the city. Jackson said he could not abide a mayor he perceived as dishonorable. So he decided to risk all and try to take her job.

So what about the Federal Government's threat to withdraw funding for these projects? Was it due to the fact that the contracts were to be handed out, patronage style, to political supporters, as in so many cities? Due to the fact that the city couldn't conduct a successful competitive bidding process? No one can tell from the article, and so what readers are left with is an unsubstantiated charge against Mayor Campbell, and blurry picture at best as to whether Jackson's "code" would be good for the city or simply more business as usual. Right now, like the many Clevelanders who couldn't be bothered to come out and vote for the mayoral Primary, Cleveland Uber Alles isn't inspired by any of the candidates and wishes the city's press organs would do a much better job in providing some facts that would aid in the process of deciding.

Friday, October 21, 2005

Lipstick, Pigs, Young Professionals Somehow, in the photo-ops, the truth always comes out. This one, which the payrolled optimists at the PD's online arm have entitled "Brain Gain: Believe in Cleveland," features pictures from an after-work cocktail/pep rally event. Mayor Jane Campbell and other luminaries, including an obligatory "young professional" of the kind the city wishes to keep (blonde haired, blue-eyed, the best of Cleveland youth), gave a series of empty speeches that were back-lit, a la our president in his own remarkably false photo-ops, by rather schlocky AV-club style lighting effect: a pink Believe in Cleveland! logo. Why pink? Who knows? Perhaps to cash in on the warm feeling of other successful public service campaigns like the one against breast cancer. Perhaps to remind us of cartoon pigs, so that we might better understand the situation that the ad campaign is trying to put lipstick on. As you look through the pictures, note that the PD couldn't even spare a pro photographer for the event, even though they themselves are spearheading the whole Believe in Cleveland! campaign. Note, too, that the crowd is overwhelmingly white (I counted around 9 minority faces, going through the pictures casually), and certainly does not reflect this city's ethnic make up. Indeed, one wonders how many of these "young professionals" were commuters from the suburbs. Considering the sheer number of bald pates in the photos, too, one might begin to wonder if the four or five young blondes might have been imported from Strongsville.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

d. a. levy fest The self-conscious lower-casing above is courtesy of the deceased Cleveland poet himself, though he now lives solely as a cultural reclamation project, as an expression, probably, of a lurking desire that has shadowed the shop-now zeitgeist of these last few years, a desire for some 1968-style upheaval. 1968, of course, wasn't simply the year of levy's mystery-clouded death; it was also the year of the Hough Riots (which I heard about in a breathless over-hyped way from my suburban parents, as veritable Halloween tale about black rage, the lesson of which was to be nice to the cleaning lady and to resist comparisons of her ankles to those comic ankles from Tom and Jerry cartoons). In '68, LBJ abdicated, thanks to the escalating debacle in Vietnam, MLK was assassinated, RFK was assassinated, etc. The music was never better: The Kinks did Something Else, Love did Forever Changes, and so on, and the year was so heady, such a turning point (student protests in Prague, Paris, New York), that perhaps one needed to think of it in terms of acronyms, just as Depression-era folks needed to think about Roosevelt's radical rethinking of the American promise as "alphabet soup." In 2004, Cleveland Uber Alles hoped the Mark Kurlansky's book, 1968, had intimated the pendulum swing, pointing to a summer of discontent, of MC5-inspired "fucking in the streets" that would somehow work this time and result (oh, how so many hoped) in the end of the Bush Presidency. You know it didn't work, but few have considered why: these days, almost no one can afford to take to the streets. Miss one day of work--you the non-corporate worker without PTO or sick leave especially--and you're fired. Miss one day of work, renter/debtor nation, and you're bills won't get paid. Thought of this way, by the way, Howard Dean's success is as sad as it is hopeful; knowing few of us could get out of work to do our part for democracy we merely typed in our credit card numbers and clicked hopefully. It's all we've got, I suppose. Anyway, levy and the October 29-30 festival dedicated to him at CSU and Trinity Cathedral, ought to provide the fifteen or twenty Clevelanders who attend it--aside form its presenters, of course--with an interesting, local way to tap into to their own sepia-toned visions of the year when the Zombies sang "Care of Cell 44" and it was possible to imagine a potentially draft dodging boyfriend from a place like Middleburg Heights singing such a song to his girl. I don't believe any but the, well, poorly read will find in his poems enough to qualify the man as Cleveland's Allen Ginsberg, but so what? On his own levy is interesting, and in such a Cleveland way--i.e. for reasons that no one, but a few smart folks, will find obvious. Forget about levy being arrested (who wasn't, it seems, when you're constructing a 1968 era hero?), forget even about the conspiracy theories (saving them, of course, for the Kennedys, and for the very frustration that we just can't seem to take big money or the man or the combine or whatever they call it now out of the driver's seat); instead check out levy's fine work as a graphic artist, which is featured at the top of this post.

Note, too, that levy himself wrote a poem entitled Cleveland Uber Alles. Great minds and all of that, right?

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Disbelieving in Cleveland Some not so astute commentators are beginning to weigh in on Cleveland’s efforts to refashion Baltimore’s Believe! campaign to suit its own brand of post-industrial, urban malaise, and at least one commentator, writing a response to a local weblog’s assertion that the city doesn’t need a slogan at all, has managed to note the primary thought disease of which the Believe in Cleveland!® advertising campaign is merely a symptom: namely our city’s oft psychoanalyzed inferiority complex. Contrary to the conventional thinking about our region’s “quiet crisis,” however, Cleveland Uber Alles asserts that this so-called inferiority complex is, if not merely the result of the middlingness of our city’s commentators and boosters themselves, then probably the result of the fact that so many Clevelanders’ with media podiums (including little ones, like this blog) are the progeny of white, immigrant forbearers who either didn’t have the good sense to buy low and stay put on the East Coast over a half a century ago or lacked courage to strike out for territories West, where they might have made a real fortune, had they the gumption or the smarts. But they didn’t, by God, these Vitos, Sergeis, Stanislavs, and so-ons; instead, they stayed put, full of their peasant village-bred fears and doubts, tethering themselves to the first mill, or foundry, or assembly line that promised them three starchy square meals a day, plus a buck or two for time to forget the whole thing in the tavern afterwards. Oh, our fathers, our fathers’ fathers and our fathers’ fathers’ fathers—we blame them, we do, all of us young would-be Cleveland media and advertising professional types, who’ve either already missed our non-existent big breaks or who feel we must move, as Bill Stern, the lament-filled founder of the Believe in Cleveland campaign said this morning on WCPN, “to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York”—for a chance to buy the right brands from their flagship stores and stride confidently to work in our dry-clean-only clothes on our way to perform the superficial duty of retelling the rest of us what the authorities would like us to think. And this, friends and fellow citizens, is a self-hating blame: minus the soppy stories about “hoping to find streets paved with gold” and “enduring for the promise of some better life,” we want to run away from the world of these poor immigrant forbearers of ours in much the same way our parents or our grandparents did, changing their names to something, well, a little more American, and fleeing the old city ghettos to for the suburbs, where it would be easier to keep up with some imaginary Joneses than to hold together a community. And it’s hard, really, to pity second, third, or fourth generation kids who cried about the reeking food our grandparents tried to feed us—for our own good—which, along with the panicked lessons of their Old World to New World deprivations, were supposed to teach us to just how much the odds were stacked against us, just how much the score favored the WASPS we’d want to emulate and want to emulate still. Yes, it’s hard to sympathize with kids like us who just wanted to go home to our safe little plots of land where the white flight had taken our parents, who just wanted to drive away from our grandfather’s house with the tomatoes he grew out back safely stowed away in the trunk and a bag of McDonald’s sweetening up the air of the family wagon. These people—our grandparents and their parents—had been foolish enough to believe Cleveland was a boomtown (wasn’t John D. Rockefeller buried here, after all?), and if they didn’t buy that the boom meant anything was possible for them and if they couldn’t recall the best hopes that were supposed to find them after the delousing on Ellis Island, then perhaps they were just plain lazy or weak, or perhaps they’d simply given in to the possibility that they might have earned a little respite from all their struggling, when any fool then or now could have told them that American Capitalism rewards manic, insomniac striving only. Ah, these past generations, whom we both complain against and love with each new plea for belief—ah, those people who Polkaed down 185th St., who funded those Catholic Churches that still draw holiday crowds from the suburbs, like the Hungarian Church on once beautiful Buckeye! Were they so wrong to wish for a little bit of peace and rest? After all those long days laying bricks, wheelbarrowing hither and thither with the materials that build the city that stands around us, didn’t they deserve to do just what they did? They broke their backs unloading ore from barges so that we could complain that the bars here suck; they picketed for days outside a plant that once made Army tanks so that we could tout the arrival of 300 luxury housing units as a cause celebre and reason to hold firm in our conviction that this city is a home for all of us (Click on the Hanford Dixon Ad for Real Audio Stream). All right: We believe. It’s not just that those who seek to remedy the city’s discomfit with itself aim so low, trading a real history of working to build prosperity for the community as a whole for McMansions for the few on our should-be public waterfront; it’s that these people deny the reality of the city itself, in favor of a fiction that merely serves the interests of the very people who are responsible for the reprehensible state of the city itself. The people behind the Believe in Cleveland! plan, like Bill Stern and Plain Dealer publisher Alex Machaskee, are white, and so are all of the various people blathering about what the campaign might mean to the city--the writers at the PD, Crane's, etc. who are making their little living reminding Clevelanders (who are so happy stuck in the past) of that cute little Cleveland is a Plum ad campaign from the late 1970s. That campaign, Stern himself explained this morning on WCPN, was really Cleveland business leaders talking to themselves, posting ads at La Guardia airport, lest Cleveland professionals deplaning there might not forget that their home wasn't so bad after all. So it is with this Believe in Cleveland! It doesn't seem to matter that according to the 2000 census over 58% of the city’s residents are minorities--as usual no one is bothering to ask them what to believe in. And when the likes of Bill Stern talks about reasons to be hopeful about the future, he doesn't have these real Cleveladers in mind anyway. Instead, he's talkng about "that 23 year-old kid who's just graduated from Case" or some other such Richard Florida inspired, Rise-of-the-Creative-Class crap GenX type whose coffee house laptopping is supposed to equal a thriving economy. There's talk about still more luxury apartments on E4th St, talk about night life, but no talk about the beauty supply shops that those apartments drove out and no talk about small business loans to the African and Asian Americans who ran those places and kept jobs in the and money inside community. Talk about wig shops and ghetto nails would be, well, too unglamorous. So, too, would be talk about working to integrate the schools (yet again) and talk about figuring out ways to increase the taxes to pay for education. All in all, what we have here, my fellow citizens, is just another instance of Cleveland's arriving late to some bankrupt thinking that eminates from some other part of the country. In this case, of course, it's Washington DC, where a faith-based government is being relied on for the likes of ongoing war and disaster relief and the message is simply this: The facts don't matter. Believe.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

The Reek of the Lake

A recent story on WCPN offers an explanation for the scent roils up from the waters that lull and lap, tired, green, and gravity drawn, against the shoreline:

Hundreds of residents along the Lake Erie shore from Cleveland to Erie, Pennsylvania called authorities last week to report a strong odor of rotten eggs. U.S. and Canadian scientists are theorizing the smell was hydrogen sulfate, a gas formed from the decay of organic wastes taking place in the lake's so-called 'dead zone.

At the powerplant near E. 72th, where warm waters exjected back into lake presumably draw the fish, the persistent still cast their lines, waiting for a catch.