I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: WE ARRIVE ALIVE-One (2013).

This is the final EP available from the We Arrive Alive bandcamp site.  In fact 2013 is the last I can find any information about this band at all.  This site, their Facebook page, there’s nothing after mid 2013.  I wonder what happened.

For this EP, the band has also grown to a 7 piece Andrew McGurk, Ben Healy, Adam Faulkner, Sean Dexter, Iain Faulkner, Michael Naude, Neil Dexter (still no idea who plays what).

“3 years” opens with some noise and fat propulsive bass and guitar.  The song feels more complex, although I’m not sure what the new musicians add to the song. There’s more noise (scraping guitar and whatnot ) that bring new dissonant textures to the song.  There may even be horns at the end (it’s a little hard to tell in the din). “Slow Fall” opens with a slow piano and an intricate drum pattern. A slow guitar line plays over the bass before some really noisy guitars are laid over the top.  At around 4 minutes the song shifts gear becoming faster and more broody.

The final song start with some ringing chords and a staccato guitar line. I like the way the new guitar introduces a melody to the proceedings. The song really starts to build at around 2 minutes, with some crashing cymbals shortly after.  There’s also a pretty middle section (which seems like a ticking clock).  The song end with a ringing guitar-and unexpected mellow ending to what I assumed would be a loud buildup to a song.

I’m intrigued by the direction the band went with this EP, although I like the sound of their previous one a bit more.  I am also concerned that they’ve broken up.  But if they have, they have three great EPs to their name.

[READ: March 24, 2015] Robert Moses

I can’t tell how ignorant I am that I’ve never heard of Robert Moses.  I mean his name sounded vaguely familiar, but I would never have known who he was (the master builder of New York City).  And I have to wonder if I am not alone.  For this book was originally written in French (and was printed in Poland and released in England).

This turns out to be a graphic novel biography of Robert Moses.  It’s hard to summarize how incredibly influential Moses was.  The back of the book says “From the streets to the skyscrapers, from Wall Street to the Long Island suburbs, every inch of New York City tells the story of one man’s mind.”

If you have seen the (excellent) book Wonderstruck, the mini model of New York City mentioned in the book was created for Moses.  New York Bound books describes the model thusly: “The Panorama, a miniature scale model of New York City that was commissioned by Robert Moses for the 1964 World’s Fair, is a 9,335 square foot architectural model that includes every single building constructed before 1992 in all five boroughs, or a total of 895,000 individual structures.”

The biography talks about his childhood as a rich young man.  How he wouldn’t let the fact that he was one of the few “Hebrews” at Yale stop him from organizing clubs.  And yet he also wanted Jewish Americans to forget their pasts (“those beards, those wigs”) and help them become American.

And then it quickly begins–Moses makes friends in high places and begins transforming locations for the public good.  He pictured Riverside Drive full of gardens. He imagined what would eventually become the George Washington Bridge.  He orchestrated the building of the Triboro, Verrazano, Throgs Neck and Cross Bay Bridges.  He created more than 600 playgrounds, 700 basketball courts, swimming pools, schools, piers, libraries and nearly every highway in New York: the Van Wyck, Gowanus, Cross Bronx, BQE, LIE.

He is disgusted by the robber barons and their big houses, their mansions and diamonds.  And he wants to change the city for the middle classes.  He makes friends in high places (on both sides of the political aisle) and has power and authority (as well as important ears to listen to).  He has power from 1924 until 1968 (from Coolidge through Johnson!).

But he also had little concern for people who were in his way.  He razed slums and built new homes and roads.  Indeed, “he will also expel ‘like cattle,’ according to one Manhattan official, the city ‘s poor and predominantly minority population.”

This split seems well summed up by this comment on page 46: “I want to create a public space for the middle classes that is as comfortable as any private club.”  This would be Jones Beach, which was designed for people with cars, but not people on buses.  He also designed Crotona in the Bronx, Astoria a Pool in Queens, Jacob Riis Park in Queens and Greenpoint.  He also created with Walt Disney the grounds for the 1964 Worlds Fair.

So Moses did some great things, but he also disenfranchised a lot of people.  And that’s where Jane Jacobs comes in.  Jacobs was a simple woman but she was not afraid to speak up against urban planning.  Especially if it meant “cars getting priority over humans beings… building great towers like those Le Corbusier failed to build in Paris…green spaces where now only dogs and criminals circulate… and destroying small family businesses in order to create urban deserts.”  Jacobs’ own book The Death and Life of Great American Cities became very successful.

By the end of his tenure, Moses’ ideas, which grew more radical were finally being questioned.  His project that would have extended Fifth avenue and destroyed Washing Square Park brought people to protest it.  His final project the “Lower Manhattan Expressway” –burying all of the distasteful slums under a ten lane highway, lingered for years until it was finally buried by Nelson Rockefeller in 1971.

So this book was really interesting and informative.  The tone is fascinating, simultaneously impressed and disgusted by the man.  I can’t get over how much I learned about the city, Moses and Jane Jacobs (who I need to learn more about).

The book itself feels a little awkward though. I wasn’t surprised to find that it was a translation (although there is no translator given credit in the book).  The dialogue and transitions are clunky.  But that can’t all be the fault of the translator.

The opening of the book really emphasizes the fact that Moses never learned to drive (he had chauffeurs).  In fact, it’s mentioned 4 times in the first six pages.  Like this awkward transition: “And though he couldn’t drive, he excelled in intellectual jousts as much as he did in physical disciplines.”  It makes sense to talk about that since he was responsible for so many roads, but it seems odd to draw so much attention to it.  There’s also weird lines like “Thus, among the axes and even the great axes on which his project will always pivot is the mastering of traffic circulation.”  I’m also intrigued by the 75 cent words in the dialogue like “What do you mean?  It’s true you can be quite Sibyllic sometimes, Robert.”

So, the book feels oddly stilted, especially for a comic book. But that’s okay because so much great information is conveyed in the book.  I’m really glad I read it.  And I’m also glad that there’ a bibliography at the back because Id like to learn more about these two fascinating people.