The Ending

When I slipped these earthly grips I swear I can’t remember a moment of decision
Just icy streets and rubber slick and collision of position careening across the boulevard
But all the same, what comes has came
Was it in my power, for the ending to not be the same?

I don’t remember losing count of the cells that mark the line between the living and the dying
Still I feel I’m holding out, tethered by the anger of this stupid situation
I move through space ephemeral, and nurse my empty glass in the corner of the bar room
Haunted by how small the sound and range of all my motions when they could be more tangible

I am wind, I’m as dust.
I am anger without potency, I am feeling without touch
I am steel, turned to rust
Clinging to this world I loved, so much but not enough

For real all ages

A while a go Defiance, Ohio played a show with Kimya Dawson and Your Heart Breaks at the public library in Olympia.  I remarked that it was an awesome show because it felt like it was “for real all ages” because there were the usual 20-something punks but also parents with their kids ranging in age from toddler to elementary school and a few grey-haired elders as well. A big part of that audience diversity seemed to do with being at a space that was public, culturally neutral and, through the very nature of the mission and programming of many libraries, all-ages.

In the past years, I’ve seen more and more folks in the DIY community organizing shows that are geared toward kids, or recording records of music oriented toward kids. This is cool and its great that DIY culture can flex to reflect people’s changing families and lives, but I’m more interested in how shows can be for real all ages and not just create special, designated spaces for people who don’t fit into the most frequent demographics about punk.

These are some questions that my friend asked me when trying to decide if she should bring her 12-year-old daughters to a show.  It strikes me that these aren’t just good questions to consider when you’re trying to organize a show that is kid-friendly, but really questions that get at a lot of assumptions we make about comfort at shows in general. Taking these things into account can not only make a show kid-friendly but make them more accessible to a variety of people whose needs might be a little different than those of the folks organizing a show.

  • Is the show no drinking? Will the show be more of a party where there might be lots of people there to just drink or hang out, or are most people there to see the bands?
  • Does the space allow smoking inside?
  • How big is the space? Are people likely to feel crowded?
  •  Is there space to hang out between bands where it’s not as crowded?

I know it’s not possible to do a great job with all of these things for every show. It’s also possible that you could work really hard to organize a show that does a good job of these things and no one seems to notice or care, or it creates an environment that’s more sterile or awkward. However, I think it’s important to keep these things in mind and try to make them priorities when it feels organic and to push to create spaces for shows where these things are organic.

What seems to get overlooked in the supreme court’s review of the individual mandate …

What seems to get overlooked in the supreme court’s review of the individual mandate is that though young, healthy people may not need health insurance, health insurance is, sadly, a gatekeeper to getting access to even (relatively) cheap and easy healthcare services.  The expense, difficulty and stigma of accessing health care without insurance, and often even with insurance, keeps people from getting into habits of self-care that can lead to better health or earlier detection when someone’s health changes.  Young, healthy people may not need health insurance in the same way as other healthcare users, but they need to take care of themselves, which should include accessing different kinds of healthcare.

I’m deeply ambivalent about an individual mandate as a solution, but I do think it exposes the shortcomings of a market-based health care system that puts the market and the system above human needs.

See Click Fix for civic processes

Growing up, I was lucky enough to be able to walk or ride my bike to my school.  When I was a bit younger, and lived farther away, the district had door-to-door bus service.  This isn’t the case in Chicago.  Students who go to magnet or selective enrollment schools have to, in many cases, figure out their transportation.  At O’s school, there is a school bus that picks students up at her school and then drops them off at neighborhood schools closer to where they live.  It’s still a few miles from her house, but slightly more convenient than having to have an adult go to her school for a pickup.

Yesterday, she called her mom to say the bus wasn’t running and she needed a pick up.  I’m picking her up today and called the school to find out if I should meet her at the bus stop or if I have to pick her up from school.  The school said the bus wasn’t running all week, but when I called the bus company, they said it ran yesterday and was running today.  This kind of communication problem, between the bus company and the school and between both entities and families sucks and there are lots of similar problems with big, bureaucratic systems like Chicago Public Schools.

SeeClickFix is a useful platform and idea for engaging different stakeholders in reporting civic problems and getting them fixed.  I’ve heard that a Code for America team will be working with Chicago’s government to implement Open311.
This is also awesome, and ultimately a move in the right direction for not only getting problems identified and fixed, but also helping people living in cities understand how governments work (or don’t work).  However, both these platforms address problems mostly dealing with infrastructure.  For many in the city, the bigger problems are issues with process: how a licensing application flows through the city, how children get picked up to and from school, income verification to get food stamp benefits … EveryBlock sometimes surfaces these issues, but its model is based around conversations and doesn’t have an accountability model or visualization of how a civic system works built into the system.

I’d really like to see a web platform and supporting on the ground community for identifying and fixing problems with the process of civic institutions.  Web platforms are often a panacea for civic problems, but I think its important in this case, just to have a document of “this is how the system is supposed to work”, “this is how it actually works”, “this is who is responsible”, “this is when a problem was identified” and “this is what was done about it.”

The White Savior Industrial Complex

Novelist Teju Cole wrote this on Twitter:

The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.

and elaborated on the idea of “The White Savior Industrial Complex” in a post on the Atlantic website.

It made me think about the relationship between the need for emotional experience and Occupy protestors participating in protests around the shooting of Trayvon Martin and more generally about how the need for emotional experience (and a culture that heavily mediates emotional experience) compels myself and others toward activism or particular gestures within activism.  I’m still trying to sort this out.

Making sure South migrations get run when using Django’s create_test_db()

I’ve been experimenting with using Lettuce for a project.  When not using Django’s test runner, you can use the framework’s test database hooks by calling create_test_db() (see the Django docs for create_test_db()) from a method in your terrain.  Django Full Stack Testing and BDD with Lettuce and Splinter is a great resource for seeing how to get up and running.  But, I was having a terrible time because create_test_db() was throwing an exception because it was trying to run the flush management command to flush data on a table that hadn’t yet been created.  According to South’s documentation, “South’s syncdb command will also apply migrations if it’s run in non-interactive mode, which includes when you’re running tests.”

While South’s syncdb command was getting executed by create_test_db(), the option that tells the command to run the migrations after running syncdb, wasn’t getting properly set.  It turns out there is a (not very well documented) workaround, you have to call south.management.commands.patch_for_test_db_setup() before your call to create_test_db().

So, your terrain.py might look something like this:

from lettuce import before, after, world
from django.db import connection
from django.test.utils import setup_test_environment, teardown_test_environment
from south.management.commands import patch_for_test_db_setup
from splinter.browser import Browser

@before.runserver
def setup(server):
# Force running migrations after syncdb.
# syncdb gets run automatically by create_test_db(), and
# South's syncdb (that runs migrations after the default
# syncdb) normally gets called in a test environment, but
# apparently not when calling create_test_db().
# So, we have to use this monkey patched version.
patch_for_test_db_setup()
connection.creation.create_test_db()
setup_test_environment()
world.browser = Browser('webdriver.firefox')

# ...

Dropping

Especially with digital products, so many things come into existence quickly, continuously checking in whether something exists or not can take a lot of time and attention.

“Dropping” would be a simple web app/social network that would let people post something like “Trello GitHub Issues integration” or “cheap coworking space in Humboldt Park” and when such a thing drops, another user could click “It’s dropped” and insert a URL to that thing.  Users would get a notification when something they’re waiting for drops and be able to confirm whether it really meets their needs.

Published
Categorized as Ideas