Kicking It

Watch the whole 90 min film at full screen resolution over at Hulu.com.

DVD coverIn the summer of 2006, while the football world’s attention was focused on Germany, thousands of players around the globe were training hard and competing to be part of another World Cup … The Homeless World Cup. It had been a wild idea by a Scot and an Austrian—to give homeless people a chance to change their lives through an international street soccer competition.Five years later, the annual Homeless World Cup had become an internationally recognized sports competition. 500 homeless players from 48 nations would ultimately be selected to represent their country in Cape Town, South Africa – coming from such disparate parts of the world as war torn Afghanistan, the slums of Kenya, the drug rehab clinics of Dublin, Ireland, the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina, the overflowing public shelters of Madrid, Spain, and the unforgiving city of St. Petersburg, Russia, where the homeless have no rights or identity. Win or lose, for these players it would be the journey of a lifetime.

Posted on April 29, 2009 
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U.N. launches World Digital Library

Last week, the United Nations launched the World Digital Library, featuring historic books, maps, recordings and other artifacts from many of the great institutions around the globe. The WDL draws on the resources of the Library of Congress, UNESCO, and other cultural institutions.

For example, below is a digitized film from 1899, shot by Thomas Edison (yes, that Thomas Edison), of the NYPD bike patrol.

Description
The film shows members of “New York’s Finest” parading at a crowded Union Square. Seen are members of the Bicycle Squad, mounted horses, and two regimental marching bands. At the time of filming, the New York City Police Department was still recovering from the corruption scandals of the early 1890’s that had severely tarnished the reputation of the department. A State-Senate-appointed group known as the Lexow Committee investigated the department and issued a scathing report that detailed serious criminal activity within the department. In 1895, public opinion was so low that the annual parade was not held. That same year, Theodore Roosevelt was appointed president of the Police Board, and he is credited with initiating strict and effective reform measures that helped restore the public’s confidence in the police.
Date Created
June 1, 1899

Posted on April 28, 2009 
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local media watch

Posted on April 28, 2009 
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PennSound

Poets are social critics by default. That is, since not very many of us take the same care to craft our daily language that poets do, poets often are (or see themselves as) outsiders. And as outsiders, many poets are well-positioned to see things that not everyone is able to see. Hence the buzz of excitement Obama generated just by carrying (and thus being photographed with) a collection of Derek Walcott’s poems three days after the election. Imagine… a politician with a daily habit of thinking about something in a meditative way.

Celebrations of the power of words, succinct demands for our attention, suggestive as well as demonstrative. When done well, poems — like film — leave the reader/viewer with much to think about, much to interpret.

There are many, many poetry websites that host, share, invite, and collect the written text. But like Meyer Abrams argues, poems should be read aloud. I remember well the first time that I heard a college friend, poet Edward Bartók-Baratta, perform a collection of his writings. Without artificial amplification, his normally quiet voice took possession of the stirred atmosphere inside the Northampton, MA church. It was a look inside the soul of someone I knew best as a baker and gardener.

PennSound is a remarkable online archive of poetry readings. Supported by the University of Pennsylvania’s English Department Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and the Kelly Writers House, the web-based project is directed by poets, and the recordings are of poets reading poetry. [Thanks to Al Filreis for the correction.]

Collecting original recordings as well as hotlinks to recordings hosted in other archives, PennSound is the “first and the biggest site of its kind,” says Charles Bernstein, an English professor and the site’s co-director.

Launched in January 2005, their first press release boasted a collection of 1500 recordings. By 2007, the site had aggregated more than 10,000.

According to a May 2007 Associated Press article, recordings are…

contributed by poets, fans and scholars worldwide and converted to digital format. Some, such as Gertrude Stein recordings from 1934, date back decades.

The site mainly focuses on historical avant-garde and innovative contemporary poetry. So while you can hear Allen Ginsberg or current U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall, you won’t find Maya Angelou.

You won’t find Billy Collins or Rita Dove, but you will find plenty of contemporary and historical readings, mostly with an avant-garde bent. Don’t miss the extensive set of Ezra Pound readings.

Sticking with the theme of this site, below is a poem that includes mention of a two-wheeled pilot.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

John Tranter reads “God on a Bicycle” at a March 30, 2005 reading at the Kelly Writers House.

Posted on April 23, 2009 
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free valet bike parking at Durham Earth Day

If you bike to Durham’s 2009 Earth Day celebration this weekend, BPAC promises to treat you kindly. Says member Steve Saltzman…

For those of you coming to Earth Day this Saturday, please ride your bicycles.

Durham’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission is offering a free bike valet service so you won’t have to carry a lock or worry about your bike being stolen. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first time this service has been offered in the Triangle.

Maybe not as kindly as Dave Wofford offers to treat cyclists dropping in the Bull City Arts Collaborative on a Third Friday, but hey, we cyclists are happy to turn the tables on our city’s proclivity to subsidize the automobile with free parking, even if only for a day.

I wonder if we know the real cost of providing this free valet service…

PARTICIPANTS CAN BIKE TO EARTH DAY THIS YEAR

Give your car the day off and use the bike valet service

Durham, NC:  Getting to Durham’s Earth Day Festival just got easier! Participants can give their car the day off by taking advantage of the bike valet service that will be offered by Durham’s Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Commission (DBPAC). The Earth Day Festival will be held on Saturday, April 25 at the CCB Plaza (201 Corcoran Street) and Historic Parrish Street from 12 noon – 5 p.m.

One of the many components of the festival this year is active and green transportation. Participants who wish to pedal to and from the festival can secure their bike at the SunTrust building at the intersection of Main and Corcoran.

Bikers who use the American Tobacco Trail can ride up to the trailhead at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, and continue a few blocks north into downtown. Streets will be closed to cars. The bike valet service is free and is a great way to travel to Earth Day. All bikes will be kept secure and must be claimed by 5 p.m.

For more information contact Ken Kaye of the Durham Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Commission at (919) 483-0749 (kkaye@nc.rr.com) or Cynthia Booth at (919) 560-4355 (cynthia.booth@durhamnc.gov). To learn about additional Earth Day activities, visit www.durhamearthday.org.

About Durham Parks and Recreation

Durham Parks and Recreation provides opportunities for the Durham community to “Play More.” The department strives to help citizens discover, explore and enjoy life through creative and challenging recreational choices that contribute to their physical, emotional and social health. For more information call (919) 560-4355.

About Durham’s Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Commission

Durham’s Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Commission was designed to develop ways to make walking and biking around Durham safe and easy. Visit www.bikewalkdurham.org to learn more.

Posted on April 21, 2009 
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Foster’s Market needs more quality control

A “vegan” sandwich from Foster’s has swiss cheese. How’s that again?

Posted on April 17, 2009 
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Time Warner Cable getting greedy

A colleague first made me aware of Time Warner Cable’s move to sneak bandwidth caps into their existing markets. Now the news seems to be exploding in the blogosphere.

I received this from FreePress.net just yesterday.

We Want More Internet, Not Less
Just as Americans are suffering economically, Time Warner Cable is trying to squeeze us even further, forcing customers to pay a steep Internet penalty for exceeding an absurdly low monthly limit. This is ridiculous. Instead of meeting growing broadband demand, Time Warner Cable is gouging Internet users.

And when I posted the issue to my Facebook profile, a free-marketeer friend had the following to say:

While we are at it, we should insist on air traffic neutrality where you pay one price to fly all you want. Or ocean neutrality where you pay one price to fish all you want. Movie neutrality where one price allows you to watch all the movies you want (I guess Netflix already does this despite not having to.)

Phillip – don’t you think that people who hog bandwidth should pay more for reducing the bandwidth available to other net surfers. Do you think it’s unfair that cell phone companies charge differently for different times of the day so as to reduce network congestion? Or that charge me by the number of pages loaded?

Of course there is the small matter of monopoly providers of broadband access. But with competition I would expect that people would pay for the bandwidth they value and reduce the tragedy of the commons that occurs when I try to watch Netflix Watch it Now movies.

Right now, since I live in an area without real competition, I’m happy to raise awareness of TWC’s doings by any means available. I’ll lobby Congress if Congress is the mechanism by which I can stop TWC from switching their pricing mechanism midstream.

Should network providers charge more from individuals or businesses who use more bandwidth? Sure. But I should also have realistic options from my Internet Service Provider about which bandwidth cap I can sign up for. Right now, Time Warner Cable offers unlimited megabytes of downloaded data, within a context of limited download speeds. And that seems reasonable.

Think of it as if the Water Department offered residences unlimited use of water, through a pipe of predetermined width. That is, you could use each month as much water as you want. More precisely, you could use as much water will fit through a residential-sized pipe per month. The difference between business-class and residential-class service would be the diameter of the pipe.

For the most part, ISPs like TWC  have determined their monthly charges in this way. They allow unlimited use of the service, piped into your home at a predetermined speed. That is, they use speed caps, not cumulative caps.

Surely I’m not suggesting that the Water Department shouldn’t charge my neighbor more than me when he waters his entire property, driveway included, every week. That’s right, I’m not suggesting that at all. Water is a precious limited resource. YouTube isn’t.

A better analogy might be cable television. For years, the model for cable television pricing has been based on the number of channels to which one wants to subscribe. Once I sign up for basic, premium, deluxe, or the super-over-the-top-all-movies package, I can watch as much TV as I want. Whether I leave a television turned on 24/7 or tune in for just the nightly Daily Show, the cable company isn’t going to charge me any more or less.

Cable TV providers have somehow avoided the “tragedy of the commons.” Never in my life has the television program I’ve been watching been “slow” because all my neighbors also have their televisions turned on.

So why isn’t TWC keeping cable Internet priced like cable TV? Because people are dropping their cable TV. TWC’s move to implement download caps is a typically monopolistic response to the growing popularity of Netflix on-demand, Roku boxes, Apple TV and other ways of streaming the TV you want to watch into your home, without signing up for TWC’s cable television service. And if they can set their bandwidth caps low enough, they’ll find a wellspring of new revenue. Business Insider reports that

…[i]n Beaumont, [TWC] had been testing caps of 40 gigabytes per month. That’s less than it sounds, especially as companies like Apple (AAPL) and Netflix (NFLX) increasingly offer hi-def movie services. (A hi-def movie can take up about 4 gigabytes.)

We think Comcast’s (CMCSA) caps are more reasonable — about 250 gigabytes per month. But Comcast is mostly trying to manage its network and weed out pirates. Time Warner Cable seems to be looking for new revenue growth areas as subscriber growth slows.

I think my friend is right on; TWC wouldn’t be able to get away with this if there were real competition. AT&T’s new service has not yet reached into my part of town, but as soon as it does, I’ll consider switching. But I’m also not going to wait (nor encourage) competition from another big business.

As for the suggestion that we ought to push for ocean neutrality while we’re at it… First, as a vegan, I probably don’t have a lot to say about this. But as far as I understand an individual’s fishing license, you can fish as much as you want with your license. If I could get away from work every day and go fishing, the state isn’t going to charge me any more than my friend who can fish only on weekends. Pricing based on volume comes into play only for commerical fishing, which just isn’t a relevant analog to home Internet service.

Like Woodward and Armstrong say about Justice William Douglas’ unabashed liberalism, I am “for individuals over government, government over big business, and the environment over all else.”  In this case, by contacting members of Congress through freepress.net, I’m OK with using the government to protect the individual and stick it to the corporation.


Full Frame

Full Frame Documentary Film Festival

fullframe

Flying Shepherd
Salt
Owning the Weather
Art & Copy
Sons of Cuba
The Yes Men Fix the World
Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait
La Chirola
Unit 25
Objectified
Oil Blue
Sweet Crude
Burma VJ

All in one weekend… I’ll be bleary-eyed tomorrow.

Posted on April 4, 2009 
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“green jobs” in Durham?

Since interest in the last conference on Durham’s “green economy” was so high, I’ll post this announcement about an upcoming conference organized by the same folks.

The Stimulus Package and Creating a Just, Green Economy in Durham: How do we get the money for the right priorities?

Thursday, April 16th, 6:30 to 9:30pm
Miller Morgan Auditorium, North Carolina Central University

The forum will focus on how the stimulus package will work for Durham and especially for the priorities of training for and creating green jobs for low income and at-risk people.

Speakers include:

  • John Quintero of the NC Budget and Tax Center
  • Stella Adams, former Executive Director of the NC Fair Housing Center
  • Chris Estes, Executive Director of the NC Housing Coalition
  • Louisa Warren of the NC Justice Center
  • John Parker, Executive Director of Good Work

Sponsored by Durham’s Black, Brown, and Green Alliance

Free and open to the public. For more information please call Pete MacDowell at 259-3140

Map:  Miller Morgan Auditorium is building 42 on the map. Park next door in the lot marked “C” on the map.


View Larger Map

Posted on March 27, 2009 
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NO to electronic billboards in Durham

At its meeting tonight (7 pm, March 24, in the Herald Sun Community room), the InterNeighborhood Council (INC) will debate and vote on two resolutions concerning the billboard industry’s request to be able to upgrade billboards, to move them to new locations along I-85, 15-501, 501, 147, and Hwy 70, and to turn as many as 25 into the digital display variety that can show a different ad every eight seconds.

One resolution, put forward by the Watts-Hillandale neighborhood, asks INC to support Durham’s current billboard policy, which has served the City well since the 1980s.

The other resolution, ostensibly put forward by the Rockwood Falconbridge neighborhood, supports an effort led by Fairway Outdoor Advertising to overturn Durham’s current policy and open the door for electronic billboards in Durham. Of note is the fact that Rockwood’s resolution is being put forward by a resident who is also an attorney with K&L Gates — a firm representing, you guessed it, Fairway Outdoor Advertising.

UPDATE: According to an email from Tom Miller and Josh Allen of Watts-Hillandale, the second resolution “was put forward by the delegate from the Falconbridge neighborhood and was supported by Patrick Byker, the delegate from the Rockwood neighborhood.”

So, is that what INC is for? Is the InterNeighborhood Council of Durham just a shill for corporate entities who find local stand-ins to help manipulate community politics? Does the Rockwood neighborhood really support overturning Durham’s ban on new billboards?

Below is an opinion column from today’s Herald Sun. Penned by Durham residents John Schelp and Larry Holt, the column introduces a new website, which I am happy to host, and explains why new billboards in Durham is a bad idea.

Visit this site to learn more about why Durham has as few billboards as it does, and how you can help keep it that way.

The billboard industry is campaigning hard to overturn Durham’s existing ban on billboards. To counter the misinformation coming from industry, folks in the community are launching a new website today at http://SupportDurhamBillboardBan.com/.

On this site, you can see photos of billboards over homes in East Durham, video clips of blinking electronic billboards in action, and a thoughtful presentation supporting Durham’s current ban on billboards.

Overturning Durham’s ban on electronic billboards would open the door to big, bright, blinking billboards on I-85, 147, 15-501 and 70. Do we want large billboards at the top of tall metal poles — flashing ads every eight seconds — near homes, schools, parks and places of worship?

The site outlines many reasons to oppose the billboard industry’s attempt to overturn our ordinance.

Billboard taxes and the local economy: Billboards are not taxed on the amount of revenue they generate. So, billboards contribute an extremely small amount to Durham’s tax revenues.

Fairway Advertising paid just $2,605.60 in taxes last year. Just $2600 for the 46 billboards Fairway owns in Durham. Many single family residences in Durham pay a lot more than that.

Replacing standard billboards with electronic ones would generate 10 times more revenues for billboard owners — from $2,000 to $14,000/month (Inc. magazine). And yet, tax revenues would remain tiny.

Adding insult to injury, if local officials wanted to remove an electronic billboard for any reason in the future, Durham taxpayers would have to compensate the owners for lost revenues.

Jobs: Durham would see few economic benefits from new jobs, since billboard companies employ very few people (mostly managers and sales personnel), and Fairway’s offices are in Georgia and Raleigh. Fairway’s impact on Durham’s economy is negligible.

Public Service Ads: A common industry tactic for undermining public opposition to electronic billboards is to offer free billboard space to non-profit organizations. The industry has employed this tactic in Durham, asking City Council members to name their favorite local non-profits then approaching the groups and offering them free billboard space. This explains why you’re suddenly seeing non-profit billboards around town.

The often unnoticed irony in this tactic is that the ads on electronic billboards change about 10,800 times/day. So, we can see PSAs for anti-drinking programs followed by ads for Bud Lite and Seagram’s Vodka.

Billboards and the environment: Electronic billboards have a big carbon footprint — equivalent to that of about 13 houses. At the same time citizens are being urged to use florescent light bulbs to reduce our individual carbon footprints, we’re being urged to embrace billboards and their energy consumption?

Public safety: Anything that distracts a driver’s eyes from the road for more than two seconds significantly increases the chances of a wreck. Electronic billboards are designed to attract drivers’ attention and are an intrinsic safety hazard. Do we really want drivers on our increasingly congested thoroughfares intentionally distracted by attention-grabbing electronic billboards?

Aesthetics: Durham citizens, neighborhood groups, and local officials worked hard to reduce billboard blight along our highways and in our city. There have been a many, many letters to the editor from Durham citizens who oppose electronic billboards and a only a few supporting the billboard industry, with most of those coming from the Friends of Durham/Chamber of Commerce camp. Some of these letter writers have blamed local government for the deterioration of billboards in Durham. The fact is that current ordinances allow billboard companies to make annual improvements in order to maintain their billboards, but the industry has allowed its billboards to deteriorate anyway. These billboards may be ugly, but don’t blame current ordinances or local government.

The Chamber’s efforts on behalf of the billboard industry to overturn the current ban on electronic billboards, despite citizen outcry, begs the question: Why are the City and County giving the Chamber $128,000 in taxpayer subsidies/year so the Chamber can turn around and lobby local officials on behalf of outside interests that contribute little to our local economy or quality of life?

And it’s inexcusable that billboard industry lawyers target a Planning staffer because the facts she presents don’t support their client’s attempt to overturn Durham’s ban on electronic billboards (Officials’ objectivity questioned, Herald-Sun, 3/08/09). Surely, the billboard industry isn’t suggesting that relevant facts should be kept from the public?

As a recent article points out, there are plenty of compelling reasons not to overturn Durham’s ordinance (Planner: Proceed with caution on billboard issue, Durham News, 2/07/09)…

  • Fairway’s billboards now produce about $2,600 in county tax revenue; switching some to digital “would still not generate significant revenue”
  • Local government cannot require the signs to carry public-service messages
  • Digital billboards could be found to violate the federal Highway Beautification Act
  • Allowing digital billboards while safety studies are pending could expose Durham to liability for accidents
  • Full sunlight reaches about 6,500 “nits;” a digital billboard can reach 10,000 nits.

Please visit our new website. Electronic billboards are a bad idea for Durham. Together, we can stop the billboard industry.

Posted on March 24, 2009 
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