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finishinglinepress · 11 months

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FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: A Grayscale Martyrdom by Alec Montalvo

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/a-grayscale-martyrdom-by-alec-montalvo/

Alec Montalvo‘s debut echos between brutalism and the ethereal. A call to magic realism, set in New York City, these poems provide a haven for detached personas. The speakers squeeze themselves through the cracks of realism and emerge transformed as something fantastical. The collection opens with Three of Swords, the remains of an abandoned backyard wedding reduced to rubble, and then revitalized as a mystic ceremony. The title poem captures the experience of being dissociated at a house party and left in the throes of cabalism. A Grayscale Martyrdom is a collection of poems about gritty transformation, the effects of #detachment and #displacement along with the double function to reconstruct what was once internally dead into something holistically living. #poetry #life #NYC

Alec Montalvo is an English teacher and poet. He holds his Bachelors and MFA in Creative Writing with a focus in Poetry. He has been featured in magazines such as Manhattanville’s Inkwell Journal, was a finalist in the Kallisto Gaia Press Contemporary Poetry Chapbook Competition, and holds publications in many small presses. In his spare time, Alec enjoys quality time with his tripod cat, Caulfield and playing tabletop games. Visit Alecintheink.com or @Alecintheink on Instagram.

PRAISE FOR A Grayscale Martyrdom by Alec Montalvo

“I love the nocturnal mind that navigates the spaces of the poem in which dark clouds comb the sky as lost lovers crawl through broken glass. Montalvo’s A Grayscale Martyrdom is a sinister delight, full of moody humor and keen observations, with images so fresh they’ll stop you in your tracks.”

–Cate Marvin

Opening in apocalyptic aftermath, where an unnamed speaker has just “finished the dig / in the yard / on [his] hands and knees,” Alec Montalvo’s a Grayscale Martyrdom is a strenuous personal and psychological excavation, a self-performed post-mortem of a speaker whose identity and relationships seem always on the verge of disintegration. Yet elusive as this speaker may be, Montalvo makes sure to anchor us in the particulars of his urban environment–unafraid to get his hands dirty, he sifts through grime and gray, looking for some scrap of mysticism or the ephemeral connection one might feel seeing “marijuana passed like a laundry line / between the scattered party dwellers.” Putting a gritty twist on the flaneur poet tradition, Montalvo stalks the city looking to project his consciousness onto what surrounds him, screwdriving embankment mirrors “in skull for a new set of eyes” or hijacking the wind’s perspective to see himself “coming down like something heavenly, crashing / through the clouds,….” With a precise diction, rhapsodous lyrical passages, and stanzaic forms that are inventive and deftly honed, this is a book that poetry readers will love as much for its craft as its personal revelations. These poems will help you contend with those “reanimated bones” you thought were long buried, they will present you with novel vantage points for seeing your past, and reveal beauty in a landscape of bodegas and vampirites.

–Anthony Borruso, poetry editor of the Southeast Review

“With these poems, Alec Montalvo braids the lonely echoes of modern life with ethereal beauty and meaning. Precise and elemental, this collection leaps from the page with resonant experiences of dislocation and yearning. ‘The mind is a wreck of a junkyard/ and the static between radio stations.’ A collection you’ll remember long after your first and second readings.”

–Melanie Faith, author of From Promising to Published: A Multi-Genre, Insider’s Guide to the Publication Process, https://www.melaniedfaith.com/

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #chapbook #read #poems

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giffingthingsss · 1 year

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Archer does some bad things in season three. Threatens to throw people out of airlocks, steals tech, grows a guy to harvest him, etc..

Obviously this is post 9/11 stuff. ‘should we torture people, collateral damage, blahdey blah.’ The things people will do that chafe against their moral code when they feel the desire for revenge and want to stop any future bad things. But there is a disconnect between the fantasy and the reality. they do maintain some star trek idealism because archer is a boy scout compared to reality.

In fantasy they know exactly what the stakes are and who is going to be doing the planet destruction. They know absolutely that billions of lives are on the line. When they discover more information, it’s actually worse. The race influencing the Xindi have created this Expanse which will eventually encompass more worlds than just Earth.

So it’s really not gray. It’s a pretty clear choice. It’s ‘I kill like ten people and save billions.’ If anything, they wimped out by not making it gray enough.

I get that people object to the scenarios. I’m on T’Pol’s side when she’s going nuts about them stealing the thing. I don’t like that they have to potentially sacrifice an innocent ship to save planets.

Then there’s the one episode where Archer is choosing the moral high ground and his crew mutinies on him.

People like their star trek to be ‘i choose the morally good option and it all works out.’ I get that. I also want that. In a way, the entire idea of the franchise is to show a good example of how to live. It’s aspirational. It should be.

I suppose I excuse some things because this is all pre-federation. There are times the Enterprise does the opposite of what later starfleet vessels would do because they have no experience and just get freaked out or something.

The post-mortem autopsies of these decisions, good and bad, are what lead to the Federation ideals and guidelines that exist later on. At least that’s the way I always looked at it.

(Also, I just really don’t get worked up about or care that much about anyone not named T’Pol, if I’m being honest. Archer did bad thing? whatever.)

#enterprise things #morally shady archer

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boricuacherry-blog · 1 year

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Pamela was only nineteen and seemed rather dowdy in her school photos from Tianjin Grammar School. But she was headstrong and had been expelled from a number of Peking schools as a teenager, that's why she was boarding Tianjin in the first place, and a few days before her murder Pamela posed for a studio portrait in Peking that made her look like a glamorous woman. Sydney Yeates, her headmaster in Tianjin, had recently made inappropriate passes at her, and so had other married men, including George Gorman, a hack journalist in Peking who would later fabricate an alibi for a suspect in Pamela's murder. A group of foreign men who hunted animals together also ran a nudist colony in the Western Hills outside Peking, and reportedly intimidated prostitutes and other young women who they invited to parties, reportedly raping them or threatening them with their hunting knives. Suspects included high society deviants like dentist Wentworth Prentice and his lowlife friends including a pimp named Pinfold, a brothel owner and club manager named Joe Knauf, and an Italian doctor, Dr. Capuzzo.

Paul French's book, Midnight in Peking, focuses on the murder of Pamela Werner, and of her father's determination to uncover the truth about her death, while also illuminating the complex political and social life of China in 1937.

Pamela was an adopted girl with unusually stunning gray eyes, whose mutilated corpse was left at the foot of the Fox Tower in Peking, an ancient and reputedly haunted imperial fortification close to the Foreign Legation and set on the fringe of Peking's criminal underworld. The Fox Tower, with its bats, stray dogs, nocturnal fox spirits that kept people away at night, was only a few hundred meters from the home Pamela shared with her adoptive father, the retired diplomat and noted China scholar Edward T.C. Werner, author of such works as Ancient Tales and Folklore of China.

With Midnight in Peking, French has produced a book that evokes a dramatic period in Chinese history, a decaying and disturbed society on the verge of violent upheaval and fundamental transformation. But it always remains a very personal story about Pamela Werner and her father. French balances the individual and the broadly historical to explore the murder of Pamela Werner in the context of a life for foreigners and locals in Peking that was disappearing or about to be swept aside. While explicit in the recreation of the crime scene and the depiction of Pamela's pre- and post-mortem wounds, French never indulges in the pornography of violence. Midnight in Peking provides a sensitive portrait of Pamela Werner, a young woman who deserved justice and who deserves not to be forgotten.

#true crime #pamela werner #peking #china #1937 #30s #book #paul french #midnight in peking

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words-writ-in-starlight · 5 years

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Hey man, in jobs defense of gray since 8, a family friend has had gray hair all his life. Sometimes it be like that. And at my eyedoctors there was a little toddler girl with all white hair.

Oh 100%! The human genome is a little more limited than some animals, but we can still get some pretty beautifully unusual configurations. In fact, you don’t even need to get particularly unusual melanin tints to get grey hair at a young age--my dad’s whole family goes grey young, and while my hair is still dark overall, I’ve been coming across grey hairs since I was about 18 and will probably be completely silver by 30. In the right light apparently you can see a few silver threads flash and I’m only 22. I’m not bothered about it. Honestly I spend so much time being asked if I’m old enough to drink that I would be pretty okay with waking up as a silver haired anime boy tomorrow, maybe it would save me some effort.

However I specifically really like the idea that exposure to certain supernatural artifacts caused Jon to gain grey threading in his hair at eight and caused something similar Gerard Keay even younger. The reasons I like this are:

A) I enjoy anything that Jon and Gerard have in common, because I genuinely 100% think that they would have been good friends if they’d met...you know...pre-mortem, on Gerry’s part.

B) I enjoy anything that makes Gerry feel more marked by his mother, because I like to torture my favorite characters and also because sometimes you just need to rampantly project and go “hey you get to have a clear and obvious mark of your abusive family”.

C) Having all-grey hair can make it hard for some dyes to stick right because of the way it alters the texture.

D) Everyone and their daughter seems to think Gerry is a decade or so older than he actually is and I like the idea that it’s actually not exclusively because he radiates Tired Old Man Energy. He does, of course. Gerard Keay was fucking born a tired old man. But everyone’s initial read is instantly confirmed when this tall scowling goth turns his head and reveals poorly-concealed grey roots.

E) I want Gerry to be a silver haired anime boy but, like, Angsty Goth Edition.

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tlatollotl · 7 years

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One afternoon in 2014, May Bernhardt, an 87-year-old Inupiat Eskimo with stringy gray hair, toothlessly chewed a banana. The fruit was perfectly ripe and a good source of fiber and potassium, but she hated it.

Bernhardt lives in a nursing home in the Alaskan Arctic, and like the other Inupiat elders in the home, she was accustomed to being served imported foods from faraway climes. But she and the others craved the traditional Inupiat foods they grew up eating. Most of them were raised in the bush of northwestern Alaska living a mostly subsistence lifestyle, eating caribou, fish, wild tundra berries, and marine mammals like seals and whales. Once they moved into the nursing home, a wooden building atop stilts drilled into permafrost beneath the grassy tundra, they had to eat what the home provided. And that meant bananas, green beans, potatoes, and pasta.

“You can’t get an old-timer Eskimo and just switch them over to white [people’s] food. Such a big change don’t agree with ’em,” Bernhardt complained. Richard, another elder sitting nearby, 66-years-old and gray at the temples, concurred with the assessment.

The problem is they didn’t have much say in the matter. Federal regulations determine which foods can be served in most nursing homes, and traditional Inupiat foods, the most unique of all Native American cuisines, sorely conflict with rules for nutrition and food safety. Since 2011, when the elders moved into the nursing home in the town of Kotzebue—with a population of 3,000, it’s Alaska’s largest town above the Arctic Circle—a distant federal bureaucracy thousands of miles away had come between them and the wild, meat- and animal fat–based diet they had grown up on.

They complained. And the staff at the nursing home listened and brought their concerns south—to dieticians in Anchorage, health care providers, and Alaskan politicians. Soon, they had sparked a battle between this far-flung nursing home and the federal government that would embroil this tiny Arctic town in a tangled web of nutrition politics.

When Val Kreil arrived in Kotzebue in 2013, he planned to stay for three weeks as the nursing home’s interim director. A soft-spoken middle-aged man, balding with a few tufts of red hair, Kreil had worked in more than 30 nursing homes throughout the “Lower 48,” as Alaskans call the continental U.S.

But Kotzebue charmed him immediately. He liked the home’s diverse staff from all over the country and world. Sure, the negative-40-degree winter days and ferocious winds were daunting, but the hardy locals amazed him with their good nature despite living in one of the Earth’s harshest climates.

More than anything, Kreil was impressed by how the Inupiat community showed respect toward its elders. In his vast experience, Kreil explained, “Kotzebue is the only place where I have seen elders truly respected. In the Lower 48, it’s more just lip service.” He admired the Inupiat tradition of young hunters always sharing their catch with elders, a sign of deference in a hunting-centered culture. So Kreil signed on as permanent director of the country’s northernmost accredited nursing home, known as Utuqqanaat-Inaat in Inupiaq.

And then he started to hear the complaints about the food—complaints that went deeper than the expected dissatisfaction from constant cafeteria food. The home had a strict meal schedule, as in other nursing homes, one designed to meet the nutritional goals determined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and enforced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, which determines reimbursements for all accredited, federally funded nursing homes like Kotzebue’s. Kreil knew his nursing home depended on federal reimbursement, and receiving that money required he serve only USDA-approved foods. He answered the elders’ supplications by blaming “the Lower 48—and the elders knew exactly what I meant.”

The only exception to the prohibition against traditional foods in the nursing home was during monthly “potlucks.” On the first Monday of each month, a long buffet table stretched across the nursing home’s dining hall with bubbling caribou soup, raw whale blubber, baked salmon and sheefish, wild berry desserts, and a bowl of seal oil—the quintessential Inupiat condiment and all-purpose dip. Steam would curl upward into the hall’s high, latticed ceilings as residents and their relatives, who provided the spread, feasted. (It could not be prepared in the nursing home’s kitchen or served using its plates or cutlery.) Potluck foods, legally considered “gifts” to the elders, were exempt from the official tallies of caloric intake that counted toward nutritional goals.

When Kreil moved to Kotzebue, he inherited the previous director’s effort to serve traditional foods more often. When he reached out to a USDA representative in the Lower 48 to discern where things stood, he was met with surprise—she was not accustomed to contact from above the Arctic Circle, where agriculture and livestock, the USDA’s focus, are virtually nonexistent. To be eligible for federal reimbursement dollars, wild game animals, she told him, would require the same pre- and postmortem inspection as domesticated animals. A pre-mortem inspection for wild caribou, moose, musk oxen, seals, and whales is, of course, impossible. (As Kreil put it, they’re “not going to just stand there for the USDA inspector to stare” at them.) And besides, selling wild game meat is illegal anyway, so receiving federal reimbursement for such food would be akin to its illegal purchase and therefore impossible.

Traditional Inupiat foods—and indeed all local foods in the Arctic—are necessarily wild. But USDA guidelines apply chiefly to domesticated produce. In addition, Inupiat dishes violate the USDA’s nutritional standards. The particular Arctic environment of northwestern Alaska shaped a unique native cuisine of wild foods high in meat and animal fat and virtually devoid of fruits and vegetables. High-fat foods like whale blubber and seal oil, though once essential for surviving Arctic winters, exceed recommendations for fat intake as taught by modern medical dogma. And serving such foods raw, a favorite Inupiat custom, is totally out of the question for federal standards. Despite its stunning natural bounty, as far as the USDA was concerned, northern Alaska is a food desert.

Kotzebue was not the only town in Alaska experiencing this fight, though. Kreil soon found an ally in Ted Mala, an internal medicine physician, who had been pushing for a rule change at his Anchorage hospital before Kreil’s arrival. Like nursing homes, federally funded hospitals and schools also receive reimbursement only by serving USDA-approved foods and meeting nutrition standards.

A tall hulking figure with a gentle voice, Mala had noticed his elderly patients frequently refusing hospital food but heartily eating traditional dishes brought in by relatives. He treated one native teenage girl with depression and suicidal thoughts who had been transferred to Anchorage from her remote village and, at first, refused to speak to psychiatrists. Once under Mala’s care at Anchorage’s native hospital, the flagship facility of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, she began eating traditional foods and opened up. “After a while they couldn’t get her to stop talking,” Mala said. “Imagine—a child flown out of her village against her will to the big city, locked up in a hospital and given tasteless food she wasn’t used to.” He still attributes her improvement to being in a place where “people were talking her own language and eating her own foods.”

Mala has numerous stories pointing to the important role traditional foods have played in his patients’ health, yet, he griped, “these foods practically had to be smuggled into the hospital like illicit contraband.” He especially recognized their value for patients suffering from mental health issues, a rampant epidemic among Alaska Native young adults.

Mala’s experience is anecdotal, but evidence is accumulating to support his conviction. The Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention began encouraging consumption of traditional foods in 2008 as a way to promote health and prevent obesity and diabetes among Native Americans. With the shift away from physically demanding subsistence lifestyles and toward foods mostly purchased in grocery stores, health problems that were once rare have become common among native peoples. Obesity rates in Alaska soared more than 60 percent from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, accompanied by rising rates of obesity-related diseases like diabetes. The medical profession increasingly sees traditional foods as part of the solution.

Mala was raised in Buckland, a tiny road-less village that sits one hour by motorboat upriver from Kotzebue. (His father, Ray Mala, was Hollywood’s first native movie star.) After finishing medical school, Ted Mala became the first Alaskan Native physician to practice medicine in his home state. He has become a leading proponent of blending native traditions with modern conceptions of health.

In 2009, Mala began attending annual White House Tribal Nations Conferences where tribal representatives gathered to raise issues and engage with specific federal agencies. Each year he represented the Inupiat Eskimo and pushed the USDA about serving traditional foods to hospitalized patients. His argument rested on cultural and health grounds—more traditional foods would improve health and strengthen native culture—but also on economic ones. In a region with few job opportunities but plentiful fish and game, serving wild foods could help the local economy, he argued. Instead of spending federal money on shipping costly produce, all of which comes from further south, funds could instead support local hunters and fishermen to provide food to the town’s nursing home, hospital, and school.

But his annual argument yielded little progress. So, in 2011, Mala tried a different route: He approached Alaska’s Sen. Mark Begich to discuss legislative fixes. Begich was familiar with the issue—it was a topic of regular complaint from his constituents. After a rural outreach trip to Kotzebue in 2012, during which nursing home staff pressed him on it, he tasked his assistant Andrea Sanders with drafting legislation that he would present on the U.S. Senate floor.

Sanders, a native of Alaska’s Yukon River delta region, began researching the issue. In early 2013, she began drafting a bill that would allow traditional foods to be served in public facilities primarily serving native people while also encouraging increased consumption of traditional foods for health reasons. She borrowed wording from Alaska’s own state regulations on wild foods. With its frontier culture and strong tradition of living off the land, Alaska’s law was far more lenient than federal rules on the topic of traditional and wild foods. Mala wrote letters of support, providing both medical and cultural perspectives for politicians and federal agencies.

The following year, in early 2014, the U.S. Congress was busy tussling over the Farm Bill, a massive piece of legislation setting federal policy for agriculture and food that is renewed every five years. Using the legislation Sanders had drafted, Begich pushed for a traditional foods amendment in the Senate while Alaska’s Don Young pushed similarly in the House of Representatives. There was plenty of debate over a Republican initiative to strip safety net legislation from the bill, but little disagreement over the traditional foods amendment. It was ultimately included in the final legislation, signed into law on Feb. 7, 2014. The amendment, titled “Service of Traditional Foods in Public Facilities,” was a major victory for Alaska and for natives throughout the country. In the words of Daniel Consenstein, a USDA representative in Anchorage, the 2014 Farm Bill was “the first time that the U.S. Congress officially recognized that the traditional foods of Native Americans are a real part of the American food system. And an important part.”

On a drizzly day in July 2015, more than a year after the passage of the updated Farm Bill, a crowd gathered around a small trailer in Kotzebue for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. A leading member of the Inupiat community spoke as raindrops splotched his notes; miles away across the tundra, rain quenched wildfires that had filled the town with smoke in recent days. The speaker stood before a row of Inupiat elders sitting in wheelchairs, themselves surrounded by dozens of locals who had come out in support. Mala stood among the crowd and received a special mention in the brief speech.

The ribbon was cut to inaugurate the Siglauq Center, Alaska’s first official processing center for native foods. The trailer, a repurposed woodworking shop, would provide space and tools to process wild game and fish served in Kotzebue’s nursing home. The crowd toured the trailer, admiring its gleaming steel counters topped with saws and grinders and its two large walk-in freezers for storage.

The construction of the Siglauq Center helped the nursing home clear the remaining legal hurdles posed by USDA regulation by providing a sanctioned place to process the food. After the approval of the Farm Bill, Kreil had called the USDA administrator once again to discuss the “Exotic Animals” provision of the Farm Bill. The provision lists common game species requiring proper USDA inspection, including deer, elk, and bison, but says nothing about two deer family members most relevant to northwestern Alaska—caribou and moose. The USDA administrator, admitting that since moose and caribou were not mentioned in the provision they may not require USDA oversight after all, agreed to defer to Alaska’s state agencies for approving these wild game meats.

Kreil had also triumphed by gaining approval from CMS for his new menu. On a conference call that included representatives of Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation and federal representatives of CMS, Kreil argued that a CMS memo released in September 2011 allowed nursing homes to serve produce from their own gardens. In the Arctic, Kreil argued, “the tundra is our garden,” and so its wild bounty was the equivalent of garden vegetables in the Lower 48. DEC granted Siglauq a permit, and CMS agreed to maintain federal reimbursements for the wild foods processed there.

By summer 2016 Inupiat foods were officially on the menu in Kotzebue’s nursing home—prepared in its kitchen, served on its plates, and counted toward the nutritional goals of its residents. Cyrus Harris, a local Inupiat man, worked as the nursing home’s official hunter and fisherman, perhaps the only job description of its kind in the country. Harris grew up along the shores and rivers of northwestern Alaska and cherishes the job that allows him to continue traditional subsistence activities and to serve his respected elders.

Despite the achievements already won, the battle over traditional foods continues. One food not yet included or approved in the Farm Bill is seal oil. A Seal Oil Task Force formed in late 2016 with Kreil and a team of dieticians pushing for its inclusion among permitted traditional foods. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin are currently analyzing seal oil samples for botulism, a potential danger of improper production and a primary concern of health agencies. If safe production can be ensured, Alaska’s DEC will allow it to join the menu.

During a recent lunch at Kotzebue’s nursing home, Bernhardt sat at one of the tables, slurping loudly at a bowl of caribou soup. Behind her, against the dining room wall, stood a large glass case displaying traditional Inupiat clothing and hunting implements—clothing that she grew up wearing that is now confined to display. Her generation may be the last to have truly grown up in the Arctic wild, and the threat posed by rising sea levels to Alaska’s coastal villages may speed the already hastened demise of Inupiat culture.

But on that day, her complaint was simpler: She thought her own caribou soup recipe was better.

#native american #first nations #Inupiat #Inupiat eskimo #eskimo #food #cooking #history #alaska #seal #indigenous

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barb31clem · 6 years

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What Happened After the Last HQ2 Competition

“Automobile Alley in Oklahoma City” by katsrcool/Flickr. Licensed under CC BY 2.0

When I traveled to Oklahoma City for the first time a few years ago I was shocked to discover that in the civic narrative of the city’s transformation – it’s origin story if you will – the triggering even for change was losing a competition fora United Airlines maintenance facility in 1991 to Indianapolis.

This United Airlines maintenance base was like a Foxconn or HQ2 of its era. It was a big deal because the thousands of jobs would be very high paying union mechanics and there were going to be a lot of them. It was anticipated that many people would be moving from the San Francisco area, where UA’s main maintenance base was, to this new facility. Here’s how the Chicago Tribune described the deal back at the time.

Score another one for Indianapolis. United Airlines chose Indiana’s capital Wednesday for its $1 billion aircraft-maintenance center, ending a 21-month bidding war among several states for the economic plum.

It was the latest of several recent development coups establishing Indianapolis as the pre-eminent growth city of the Midwest.

Just two weeks ago the U.S. Postal Service chose Indianapolis over 30 other Midwestern cities for its Express Mail sorting facility, which is expected to create up to 700 jobs. Four years ago the city, which has become the national center for amateur sports since the construction of the enclosed Hoosier Dome stadium in 1984, hosted the Pan American games.

The United maintenance hub, however, is by far the largest economic development project captured by the central Indiana metropolis in several decades.

The 3 million-square-foot complex of airplane-maintenance hangars and other buildings, to be built on a 300-acre site at Indianapolis International Airport, will employ up to 7,000 workers paid an average of $45,000 a year.

It will be, in fact, one of the largest aircraft-maintenance facilities in the world.

In addition, the center, to open in late 1994 to service United`s growing fleet of Boeing 737 jet aircraft, is expected to generate another 5,000 jobs at Indianapolis firms that will provide supplies and services to the center and its employees.

Construction of the facility, scheduled to begin next August, also will provide jobs for about 5,000 construction workers and will funnel millions of dollars of additional revenues into the tax coffers of Indianapolis and Indiana.

At the time this competition was ongoing, Oklahoma City had been struggling during an energy bust. The city went all in to win it, putting $300 million in incentives on the table. They made it to the final two, only to be told they’d lost out to Indianapolis.

The city pressed UA to give them a post-mortem analysis on the loss, and the airline eventually told them that even though they had the best bid, their employees had given Oklahoma City the thumbs down. They were unwilling to move there.

Ron Norick, the mayor at the time, went to Indianapolis and saw the downtown developments there. I can assure you, downtown Indianapolis was not that great in 1991. Most downtowns weren’t. However, the level of activity they did have – the relatively new to town Colts, the Pan Am Games, the restored Union Station – was much better than many other places of that era.

Norick ended up proposing what became the first iteration of MAPS – Metropolitan Area Projects – in which city taxpayers agreed to a limited time sales tax increase to fund downtown improvement projects. It was only after MAPS passed that the 1995 bombing occurred, and completing the projects was part of the city’s healing process from that trauma.

What I find interesting about this is that an event which looms so large in the leadership consciousness of Oklahoma City is completely unknown in Indianapolis. I never even know that it was OKC Indy had beaten to win the deal in the first place. Presumably almost no one in Indianapolis did. Nor did they know the transformative impact this loss had on OKC.

But there’s a reverse side to that. The people I talked to in OKC also had no idea what had become of that maintenance facility in Indianapolis. As it turns out, that United base never achieved its promise. In fact, United closed it only a decade after it opened in 2003. According to the New York times from that era:

A huge, light-gray building, trimmed jauntily in blue, rises from the rolling, grassy fields on the far side of the runways at Indianapolis International Airport. From the approach road, the building seems active. But the parking lots are empty and, inside, the 12 elaborately equipped hangar bays are silent and dark. It is as if the owner of a lavishly furnished mansion had suddenly walked away, leaving everything in place.

That is what happened. United Airlines got $320 million in taxpayer money to build what is by all accounts the most technologically advanced aircraft maintenance center in America. But six months ago, the company walked away, leaving the city and state governments out all that money, and no new tenant in sight.

The shuttered maintenance center is a stark, and unusually vivid, reminder of the risk inherent in gambling public money on corporate ventures. Yet the city and state are stepping up subsidies to other companies that offer, as United once did, to bring high-paying jobs and sophisticated operations to Indiana. Many municipal and state governments are doing the same, escalating a bidding war for a shrunken pool of jobs in America despite the worst squeeze in years on their budgets.

The buildings have subsequently be released, but last I checked the city was still paying off the bonds it issues for the gigantic subsidies it had doled out to win the deal. From the Indianapolis perspective, the deal was a big underperformer and arguably a money loser.

It’s very interesting to me that a shared event of that nature can have such an impact yet produce no shared consciousness.

from Aaron M. Renn https://www.urbanophile.com/2018/08/14/what-happened-after-the-last-hq2-competition/

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peachymintxo-blog · 6 years

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Smartphone compare

Crafting Your Next Smartphone

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tortuga-aak · 7 years

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Inside the complicated fight in Alaska for the right to eat sea blubber

AP/Gregory Bull

They complained. And the staff at the nursing home listened and brought their concerns south—to dietitians in Anchorage, health care providers, and Alaskan politicians. Soon, they had sparked a battle between this far-flung nursing home and the federal government that would embroil this tiny Arctic town in a tangled web of nutrition politics.

David Goldman/AP

Reuters/Bob Strong

But on that day, her complaint was simpler: She thought her own caribou soup recipe was better.

NOW WATCH: Animated map shows what would happen to Asia if all the Earth's ice melted

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graystreet003 · 11 months

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youtube

Dr. Trousers are you gonna kidnap me

#dr trousers clinic #gray allard #dr trousers #pre mortem gray #dtc #Youtube

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thesinglesjukebox · 7 years

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ZAYN & TAYLOR SWIFT - I DON'T WANNA LIVE FOREVER (FIFTY SHADES DARKER) [3.84] We shift from our BBC Sound Of 2017 coverage to the pop charts, but we're not any nicer...

Lauren Gilbert: This is Bad. For all that "Love Me Like You Do" felt like Lights Redux, it was a perfectly solid song outside of context. This features Zayn wailing (someone needs to tell him falsetto isn't always a good idea) and Taylor utterly failing to save the track. It feels like someone told her to write something cinematic, and you can indeed picture the scenes from Fifty Shades Darker that this will soundtrack: Dakota Johnson looking sad in an art gallery, Dakota Johnson looking sad in a cab, flash of Jamie Dornan looking Imposing and Sexy, Dakota Johnson looking sad in a different art gallery. Movie soundtrack singles aren't required to be this dreadful. [2]

Katie Gill: Confession: I adore the Fifty Shades of Gray soundtrack. It's the only place where awful Beyoncé remixes can sit side-by-side with various Top 40 artists trying to be "sexy" but in a watered-down, approved for Clear Channel radio type way. And speaking of Clear Channel-approved sexiness, there's this song! It's kind of awful! Zayn is desperately trying to do his best Prince with that falsetto and Taylor Swift is straight up phoning it in. It's a half-assed mess and I LOVE IT. Every time the chorus starts up with "I DON'T WANNA LIVE... FOREVER," I break out into giggles. Which granted, isn't the intended effect of the song, but don't make your song sound so silly and I won't laugh at it. [3]

Maxwell Cavaseno: There's a way to take narcissistic angst and self-torment and make it work. Last year Kehlani turned the grotesquerie of the IG Meme Disease of Harley Quinn and Joker's Bonnie & Clyde archetype into a perfectly tragi-dumb song like "Gangster" for Suicide Squad. The year before that Beyoncé made "Crazy in Love" go all overwrought and comically grave for Fifty Shades of Grey's soundtrack, and the Weeknd finally got to take his supplanting of a personality with kinks to the top 40 for that same project. This formula is not foreign in pop of the 21st century -- that indulged feeling of inner darkness and putting on that King/Queen of Pain crown is pretty common. Heck, Swift even knows how to mock it. So who do I blame for taking such an obvious task and somehow screwing it up into an over-eager romp mistaking "darkness" for some sort of just plain ol' romantic tension? Is it Antonoff, who thought he was trying to make sadomasochism "fun" (ha, double entendre)? Or is it Malik, who we've spent a good amount of time trying to draw fake depth from like water from rocks? It's a simple enough scheme, and there's a whole sea of edgelords who'd gobble it up with appreciation. Why couldn't anyone realize that here? [2]

Crystal Leww: I'm one of the handful of people who thought that Zayn's debut album wasn't a total trainwreck -- while the album was 80 per cent filler, it also had its moments. Taylor Swift, despite her general media personality, is a phenomenal songwriter and a pretty good pop star. She's proven that she can effectively pen songs for other people to make their own. So why does "I Don't Wanna Live Forever" sound like the worst parts of Zayn have dragged Taylor Swift into the hole of boring anonymity. This is so slow, so long, and so unsexy. The lone bright spot is "I been looking sad in all the nicest places," which like, fine, we get it, you're Taylor Swift, but at least it's declaring who they are as artists. [4]

Claire Biddles: Like "Pillowtalk," this is trying so hard to be sexy, but it's so unconvincing, and like "Pillowtalk" it's because of the deeply unsexy performances. Both Zayn and Taylor come across as pretty asexual to begin with, but the constant forced falsetto makes for a really unpleasant listen. I guess at least if you went back to someone's flat and they put this on you'd know to make your excuses and leave before the boring sex began. [2]

Olivia Rafferty: Because when I'm commissioning a big, sexy number for my big, sexy film, I obviously think of Taylor Swift and Zayn. The lyrics barely grasp at anything that resembles a sentiment, and the "oh-oh oh oh" refrain is an ironically vapid space-filler. The biggest crime is that at some points the song actually has a little charm: that breathless, "baby, baby/I feel crazy," or Taylor Swift's verse. And then for some reason it was decided that Zayn must screech falsetto on the chorus, and TaySwift must sing the most criminally Swiftian lyric I've ever heard: "I've been looking sad in all the nicest places." A half-hearted attempt to follow the anthemic "Love Me Like You Do" and a half-decent soundtrack the first time 50 Shades rolled around. [4]

Megan Harrington: Overwhelmingly, duets between men and women are in service to a romantic narrative. And on the surface, "I Don't Wanna Live Forever" is no different, a supposedly lusty song tacked onto a supposedly lusty movie. But are there two performers any less sexual than Zayn and Taylor Swift? The two share a vocal chemistry similar to the rush neurotics feel when they stumble on a perfectly organized shelf of books -- and that's their only chemistry. The song, then, must be about something else, something other than desire and lost love. The refrain "I just wanna keep calling your name/until you come back home" suggests that we might have our first duet in service of finding a lost puppy? [7]

Ramzi Awn: The right kind of anthemic also happens to be the kind that makes Taylor Swift sound good. [9]

Alfred Soto: Although Taylor Swift's name is in the songwriting credits, this soundtrack theme has the fingerprints of men who would destroy the world with a blank falsetto if only she'd stop the nonsense and Come Back Home. The Weeknd. Drake. Everywhere I look, this po-faced pair: immobile with anger, confusing churlishness with pheromones. [4]

Jonathan Bradley: The Fifty Shades franchise offers pop royalty the chance to roleplay their unconventional fantasies, mixing sex and power, darkness and destruction. So goes the theory, anyway: the results (The Weeknd's "Earned It," for instance) have tended towards pouting and murk with neither titillation nor intrigue to compensate. Zayn has yet to evince the ability to project himself beyond the blank slate of his good looks -- his falsetto "baby, baby/I feel crazy" on "I Don't Wanna Live Forever" has none of the desire or desperation that even a novice R&B singer could unearth from those words and their attendant post-Timbaland, click-clack rhythm. Taylor Swift is a smarter vocalist; even if she's had little experience with R&B cadences, she still knows how to suggest a lyric like "I've been looking sad in all the nicest places" conceals fathoms of feeling beneath its surface. But Swift the writer doesn't play nice with the other kids; her perfectionism and her steely-eyed creativity doesn't well accommodate an equal partner, to the extent that her most triumphant 2016 work was "Better Man," where she was the most powerful voice on a song in which she did not appear. Swift might well have within her a tantalizing reflection on sex and mortality, but a shared promo single for sequel Hollywood erotica, released in her gap year, is not where we'll hear it. [5]

Andy Hutchins: One of the greatest stratagems of Taylor Swift's genius-level career was befriending Lena Dunham. Despite Lena Dunham being Lena Dunham, that brought Swift into pop maestro Jack Antonoff's orbit at almost the precise moment when she was transitioning from pop-country to pop-pop, and when he was just done being trained in frequent Kanye collaborator Jeff Bhasker's style on fun.'s Some Nights. (I mean, it's either that, or living with a woman who is now dating the First Daughter's strenuously Democratic brother-in-law, or being born to millionaire parents. It's hard to weigh artistic and social positioning and inherited privilege with Tay!) Since Red -- which Bhasker worked on, naturally -- Swift has worked in Antonoff's milieu, even if her biggest singles have been Max Martin specials: Shadowed gloss-pop, with just enough darkness contrasting her natural brightness to make her "edgy" and "fun" without also being sloppy. ("I been lookin' sad in all the nicest places" says plenty about Swift's conflation of status and composure with happiness.) "Forever," -- "Come Back Home" in a less fatalistic world -- showcases how well she fits there, her breathy anonymity as a singer well-shrouded by the misty production and Zayn, whose far stronger falsetto is the star of the song itself. But he's been here in the twilight, and Swift is only still immersing. [7]

Anthony Easton: I love how his voice slides up when he sings "baby" -- like Michael just a little bit -- and I love how that is the only attempt at overshadowing her. In fact, a sample of both of them singing "baby, baby" to each other is a fascinating competing example of pop history as pop performance. The rest of it is disappointingly anonymous. [6]

Mo Kim: "Gimme something," yelps Zayn in the first verse of this track, a pre-mortem for a slog that (save a few nice twinkles in the production) gives us nothing. [1]

Katherine St Asaph: Every generation gets the "Once in a Lifetime" it deserves, and fails to get the "Who Wants to Live Forever" they so achingly want. [3]

A.J. Cohn: Likely, this is meant to sound dark, achingly romantic, and sensual -- notably not typical descriptions of Swift's music. Unsurprisingly, her vocals are thin and uncomfortably breathy. Her chemistry with Malik is similarly unconvincing and not for his lack of effort. Using his exquisite falsetto to full effect, he seems to be trying his sexy best to make a slow jam out of a sub-1989 bonus track. [4]

Will Adams: Ah, it's easy when everyone contributes equally to the disaster. Jack Antonoff's production is like a 1989 demo, with unfinished ideas (that false climax before the last chorus, like Zayn came too early, is the worst) and a sluggish arrangement. Zayn's yelped falsetto hasn't gotten any better, and Taylor Swift's attempt to display versatility is just as laughable. As a Fifty Shades song it's perfect, in that it's trying so hard, but "I Don't Wanna Live Forever" is so sexless, detached and inept that I can only imagine that Zayn and Taylor recorded their respective vocals with a mirror in the studio. [1]

Joshua Copperman: There's a specific kind of electro-pop song that goes for maximalism, where, to paraphrase Rick McCallum, every second has so many things going on. Jack Antonoff and Swift's last single together, "Out of the Woods," is one of those beautifully overwhelming songs. They reunite here, but for an R&B slow jam that plays to none of their strengths and seems to go out of its way to be "darker," and not joyfully bombastic, which both singles from the previous movie were. Every time it sounds like it's going to explode, it pulls back, like they want to try this whole minimalist thing out, but don't know how to pull it off. The deliberate, yet misguided, attempt at minimalism would also explain the decision to not autotune Zayn's falsetto. (Zayn and Taylor sound nearly identical anyway; if I'd heard that this was actually sung by the Ten Second Songs guy, I wouldn't be entirely surprised.) The defining moment of this whole trying-too-hard-to-sound-effortless thing is the anti-climax at 2:58, inexplicable and inexcusable -- everyone involved is capable of great pop music, but that moment was where I stopped trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. As long as Taylor doesn't go down this route for her next album, this experiment can be forgiven, but experiments should not sound this formulaic. [4]

Thomas Inskeep: My partner, upon first hearing this, suggested that he could barely hear the difference between Zayn and Swift, particularly on the chorus, and he's not wrong. Neither of them should be centering their singing on their falsettos, both of which are incredibly unappealing, and additionally it sounds as if Swift stripped all of the personality from her voice before entering the studio. This song is all bombast, if the bombast were made from tissue paper. And since Jack Antonoff is involved, it of course has the predictable "boom-boom-boom-boom" drum track he's been recycling since fun.'s "We Are Young." Nothing, absolutely nothing about this is any good; fittingly, since it's soundtracking a new Fifty Shades movie, this is the musical equivalent of an empty-calories Hollywood blockbuster. [0]

Nellie Gayle: Did you ever see that one painfully awkward interview between 50 Shades costars Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson? Never have I seen two people less likely to generate brutal lust and desire in a believable way. That is, until I heard Zayn and Taylor were collaborating on a song for the same franchise. While Zayn's favorite habit is snaking his way around R&B tunes in an overreaching falsetto, Taylor prefers to lend her reedy vocals in the spectrum of pop-country to Top 40 bops. One thing both Zayn and Taylor accomplish very well in their respected fields is relatable anguish. Taylor's vocal thinness translates into despair, while Zayn's insistence on turning every lyric into a gymnastics exercise for his vocal chords. The production involved is really what transforms this song, and it's clear that this is a surface-level reflection on a franchise neither star has any interest in or connection to. The 50 Shades empire is about presenting dangerous ideals to bored and titillated white women around the world, and this song manages to tease any sweetness or tenderness out of that narrative and turn it into a sultry, almost danceable banger. It's Taylor's riskiest bet yet -- if you listen hard, you can hear the wails of Republican mothers around the country in the chorus as they wait for their daughters to be corrupted by this song -- but it still remains a tame anthem to romantic melancholy more than anything. [5]

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#Zayn #Taylor Swift #I Don't Wanna Live Forever (Fifty Shades Darker)

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