Steelers

Steelerbaby.com

I'm not sure how it happened, but I'm not a sports fan, and never was one. Nonetheless the local football franchise the Pittsburgh Steelers are headed into a big game on Sunday. It's a game against the New York Jets to determine the Conferencre Champion and who will go to the Super Bowl. It's sad that I'm so lost when it comes to football because the excitement around here is palpable.

Seven or eight years ago I went regularly to the African Student Association meetings at the University of Pittsburgh. A few of the friends I made there have stuck around this area but most have moved on. But it's fun to see on Facebook what big Steeler fans some of them are.

John Michael Greer has a recent post, The Onset of Catabolic Collapse. Catobolism is the breakdown of molecules, it's also the name used for wasting to death. Greer uses the notion of catabolic collapse to describe the process of empires falling, especially in connection to peak oil. Greer provides a very readable account of the process in the post and then makes a good point:

That being the case, the question is simply when to place the first wave of catabolism in America – the point at which crises bring a temporary end to business as usual, access to real wealth becomes a much more challenging thing for a large fraction of the population, and significant amounts of the national infrastructure are abandoned or stripped for salvage. It’s not a difficult question to answer, either.

The date in question is 1974.

Wow, he hits the nail on the head for people in the Pittsburgh area. The collapse of the steel industry here was huge and began right about then. More than two hundred thousand people were directly employed in the industry in the early 1970's in Allegheny County--where the city of Pittsburgh is--by 1980 there were less than five thousand employed. One of the results is there are Pittsburghers all over the country, they moved away to find employment. Lots of them are Steeler's fans to this day.

One of my brother's daughters is a huge Steeler fan. She's never lived in Pittsburgh and I bet that most of her school chums are Miami Dolphin fans. It's hard to account for it. My brother has a more normal interest in sports than I have, but he was never a rabid Steelers fan. My little niece could qualify as one though.

I was looking for a picture for this post and one way I was searching was to search photos marked as Creative Commons at Flickr. It was fun looking at the results, but I didn't find just the right picture. Lots of the pictures seemed related to particular people's experience. There were many pictures of new born babies dressed in Steeler branded clothing. We're maniacs around here for the Steelers. Wherever I've gone this week there have been folks dressed in Steeler clothing. The baby pictures at Flickr reminded me of Steeler Baby. It's a fun site to get the flavor of our town.

I have been reading up on conservatives. Nothing really to report yet, except my heart's not in it. One nice thing about enthusiasm for sports is that it seems to infect liberals and conservatives alike. Ha! And there's a certain working-class sensibility about the Steelers. People all over the USA are Steeler fans--probably many more loathe them. Still, tell someone anywhere in the USA you're a fan and it means something solid, maybe even a bit stodgy.

Go Steelers!

Update: The Pittsburgh Steelers defeat the New York Jets to become the 2011 American Football Conference Champions. The Steelers will face NFC Champions the Green Bay Packers in the 45th Super Bowl February 6, 2011 in Arlington, Texas.

G20 Pittsburgh Summit

http://www.flickr.com/photos/knobil/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

I followed the news of G20 on Thursday and Friday evenings by obsessively updating Twitter search. I'm not very swift when it comes to learning computer stuff. For example I use Open Office Writer frequently and have for years. I'm appalled that I still don't know how to do rudimentary things with it: What are styles? I also seem incapable of being succinct about any subject; probably revealing my ignorance of most subjects more than anything. So while I'm happy to look at my Twitter stream, I don't put up tweets.

Earlier this month I learned about riots in Kampala early through updates at Facebook. I know some folks in Kampala so I was keen to find news, but little was available. So I turned to Twitter searching #Kampala. Because I read some Ugandan blogs, some of the persons putting up tweets were known by me. Following retweets, people copying tweets they find relevant so their Twitter followers will see them, I was able to identify trusted sources; following friends of friends. The riots were very worisome and as it turned out some of my friends were affected by the violence. It probably is a little strange, but the flow of tweets during that crisis was engaging. I tend to stay up far too late, so I was getting real time updates.

Appfrica "is a web portal for the latest news related to African innovation, education and entrepreneurship in technology." Incredibly quickly after the riots Jonathan Gosier, CEO of Appfrica Labs,wrote an incisive piece about citizen reporting of the event with thoughts about how to make such reporting more useful, entitled Asynchronous Info, Disjointed Data and Crisis Reporting.

I was eager to use Twitter as a source for information about the G20 Pittsburgh Summit. In advance of the event I followed people and planned aggregators at Twitter. But when the pedal hit the medal, the generic search #G20 seemed the best way to follow events. Posts at times were coming fast and furious, and as a "Trending Topic" the thread included Spambots. Still it was easy to identify credible sources, even when I hadn't known about most of them in advance. I was quite impressed that reporters from various mainstream news outlets were participating in the stream.

People were listening to the police radio and tweeting what they heard. For example a tweet was broadcast that four hooded actors were at a certain location with the added directive: Leave Now! The other side of the coin was that at one point the police dispatcher remarked that their Twitter intelligence was pretty good! Network research scientist Valdis Krebs wrote for One Web Day:

Remember...

The technology that gives You the power to organize,
also gives Them the power to watch.

I'm not sure where that leads us, but it was hard to miss during the action.

Because I know Pittsburgh well, I was able to place addresses and to recognize places in photos and videos, even the grainy ones taken with cell phones. On Thursday there were some windows of businesses broken. A friend of a friend put up photos on Facebook taken from inside her place of work across the street from the action. The photos were good enough to use for identification of the perpetrators. Probably the most serious of all the property damage done was done by one guy from California. My father was incredulous about the report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I reminded him of the location of the banks damaged and pointed out that the corner had to be one of the most photographed in all of Pittsburgh. If there were more involved they're certainly on tape and can imagine no reason the authorities would be holding back.

The photograph is from Mark Knobil's G20 photoset at Flickr. Mark is an accomplished cinematographer. I love his still photographs and often enjoy them best large. Prior to the event we were talking in a group of friends speculating what might happen at the G20. I suggested that the police probably wouldn't let marchers go beyond a particular street. I pegged it about right, what hadn't occurred to me at the time is what it would mean for the neighborhood where Mark lives. I suspect he was more prescient than me. His photos from his neighborhood move me because I love the part of the world where I live. His photos are brilliant in general, and if you want a sense for what Pittsburgh looks like you can really get a feel for it exploring his posted photos of the region.

There was lots of press touting the transformation of Pittsburgh from a sooty industrial town to a greener high-tech industrial base. This article in The Christian Science Monitor is a good example. But what the articles fail to convey is how painful the collapse of the steel industry here has been. Coping with that transition has been a defining effort for people of my age locally. It seems as though I'm reaching for something other than "misery loves company," but perhaps there is a bit of that in our local character. At least there is a shared experience of loss and attempting to make tranformative change.

Seeing the city reflected through the lens of international attention has been interesting to me. I'm eager to get together with others to talk about the experience. I wonder if anyone else was paying attention to Twitter? My hope is the G20 has stimulated our thinking about what we might do together. We've come along way as a region, but surely there's a long way still to go.

Make a Plan

The first hints of autumn's approach are here. The Goldenrods are just beginning to bloom and the Joe Pye Weed. Goldenrods are so common here most people think they are all the same, but actually there are at least sixty species in our area, so the blooming period is extended. Singing insects have begun their chorus too. A friend gave me a stack of zinnia seed packets last Christmas, so I'm enjoying an abundance of blooms in vibrant colors. The zinnias are also very attractive to butterflies.

We've had plenty of rain of late so growth is lush, especially the weeds abounding. My garden is a mess. That's more or less the intention, but every year I try to imagine it not being quite such a mess. I do look at the garden with a forward eye to next year, but making plans always seems easier in the Spring. In the spring I can see where some stone is, even if I can't figure out how to move it. In the summer it's all under a thicket of bramble so getting the stone seems impossible. Yet when I look at the garden now I want stone to play with now. I look out and want less grass to grow, but feel daunted by the challenge of growing anything but weeds. Summer is a lazy time. The signs of autumn's approach shake me from my torpor, if only a little.

The truth is I'm no good at making plans.

Last Friday I had a night out. I visited with a friend in the late afternoon then we met her brother and mutual friends at a restaurant. My friend's brother is a psychiatrist who works with war veterans. I'm a bit prejudiced about psychiatrists. Having gotten to know my friend's brother over the last couple of years I've come to see him as a fine physician, a humane human being and someone I like. He and my friend who's a district attorney in Family Court, have the most high-pressure jobs of the group. We sat at an outside table and I'd brought along a bouquet of zinnias for the table. I would have happily spent another hour drinking and talking, instead we went to a movie.

I rarely go to see films and sometimes I love them. We saw The Hangover which I thought awful. The movie was disturbing to me and it was unsettling to dislike a comedy so much. Am I really humorless? Both the folks with high-pressure jobs thought it funny and just the ticket for the evening.

At the dinner conversation: the subject of politics had come up. I do read about American politics. But the context of my reading about politics is framed by concerns summed up in a blurb from James Howard Kunstler's book The long Emergency:

The global oil predicament, climate change, and other shocks to the system, with implications for how we will live in the decades ahead.

In other words I spend a great deal of my time with my hair on fire.

My friend's brother had never met the couple who joined us for dinner. He was apprehensive at first and a little peeved at his sister for not telling him they'd be coming too. Apparently he's got a similar sort of prejudice about attorneys as my prejudice about pyschiatrists. We all got along well, and the political conversation was polite with no disagreements. I didn't want to come off as a raving lunatic. Still throughout the conversation about politics the question pressed in my mind was "How do we cope knowing the gravity of the crises before us?"

Dave Pollard posted a beautiful post on Monday, We Were Here where he very much captures my unease prompted by the political talk:

They (and perhaps all of us) are afflicted with a new kind of endemic dissociative mental illness. The dissonance between what we 'know', in some primeval way (like the wild animals who sense an impending storm or earthquake or 'hear' noises outside conscious perception), and what we 'think' based on the day's news and on the conversations we have about the needs and events of the moment, is utterly inconsolable, irreconcilable. So we try to ignore that dissonance. We pretend it isn't real.

Posting Pollard's quote might seem as if I'm projecting the disassociation onto my friends, so I want to be clear to own up: the dissonance is mine. I suspect my friends feel it too, but it's awfully hard to talk about. I don't know how to initiate the conversation.

Today on my Twitter stream I got a gentle prod from we20 to actually do something in advance of the G20 Meeting in Pittsburgh during September. we20 is politically neutral. The idea behind the site is quite simple. Use the we20 Web site to announce a meeting of a small group of people, say twenty. Then as a group hammer out a plan to do something around finding solutions to the global economic crisis and post that. A splendid and constructive idea. My plans for a July meeting fizzled, so I better get moving for one in August.

Oddly just prior to seeing the we20 tweet I'd been surfing the Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project group at Facebook which has almost 500 members. The organization's Web site is here. I noticed that Paul Massey of we20 had left a wall post there, so I didn't feel a need to tweet it. Indeed I felt unsure I wanted to join. There's was a twinge of paranoia about it, you know, landing on a no-fly list--not that I plan to fly anywhere. More generally I've never been a good leftist, going way back it being a radical always seem too much work for a lazy guy like me. Quite specifically I have no interest in trying to disrupt the G20 Meeting.

From the looks of the Facebook page most of the participants are younger than I. I'm glad the kids are talking. I'm very interested as to what they have to say too. These days I seem more aware of a generation gap in the way the generations speak. Of course whatever the generation, some ideas seem very wrong, promotion of violence top of my list of wrongness.

In August Congress recesses and it's one of the few times of year representatives hear from their ordinary constituents in person. The issue of the day is structural change to our health care system. Health services are paid for primarily through private insurance schemes. Outside the USA the prominence of the profit motive in medicine here may be hard to fathom. Insurance, Big Pharma, and business groups are investing full force to influence the direction of the changes to the system. Public relations companies have been busy trying to organize for the August recess. On tactic being promoted is the disruption of public meetings with representatives. This irritates me because our elected representatives seem out of touch enough as it is.

I'm tired of argument. It's not that I don't think politics is important, because of course it is. What I long for nonetheless is politics that breaks through the dissonance between what we know and feel. The challenges humanity faces are heartbreaking. There must be a space for conversations enabling enough trust that we can reveal our hearts. we20 seems a great idea to me: Small groups and an intention to make a plan. The idea enforces enough intimacy to be real. I know I can't make a plan alone, perhaps together we can.

In August thoughts of cold winter are not far away, but there's still time. It's a good month, so I'll have to pick a date for a we20 meeting. How does August 22 sound?

Boss Hoss with the Hot Sauce

That photo of Pittsburgh's legendary DJ, Porky Chedwick was brazenly stolen from this fan page.

In today's paper an item, Crowd cheers Porky's 90th birthday at 'Roots of Rock and Roll', caught my attention. I suppose it didn't surprise me much that Porky Chedwick is 90, but noted that he's been on the radio in the Pittsburgh market for sixty years. He still does a show!

I don't know how frequent bloggers do it? There is so much great writing on blogs, and the output some bloggers manage simply astounds me. Recently I started reading Daisy's Dead Air. Daisy is a great writer, fierce and funny. And something lovely for me is she writes from Greenville, South Carolina, where some of my formative years were spent. We moved there in the early 1960's. That was a time of moving from legal racial apartheid to something else--what we've got here now in the USA isn't exactly clear to me. Oh yeah, Daisy is about my age and digs music.

Back in the day--when I was a little boy--radio was a big deal. In Greenville my mother would drive us to school, I went to a private school right downtown and we lived out in the outskirts. The radio we listened to in the car was a mix of R&B, soul and some pop music, a sort of watered-down version of what is known as Carolina Beach Music. It does seem odd that in a time of racial segregation, the music that many southern white kids listened to was music made by African Americans.

American popular culture is a mongrel culture. For all that is wrong with the good USA, our mongrel mix-up may be our saving grace.

Pittsburgh is a hilly place. There are three rivers right downtown--here's a picture by Sohail Khwaja at Flickr that shows the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers confluence making the Ohio River. One of the consequences of all the hills and hollows around here is that neighborhoods are rather distinct geographically. The steel barons had a "divide and conquer" approach to local government, finding it easier to control small governments. So Pittsburgh is a patchwork of small towns and neighborhoods. Porky Cheswick grew up in Homestead. Homestead has a storied history in the American labor movement with the 1892 Homestead Strike. The author of the Wikipedia article on Porky notes:

His was a close-knit, culturally and racially diverse neighborhood, which he often compared to "a secluded island," where things such as one's skin color simply didn't matter. As Porky told this writer, "We a1l had one thing in common--poverty."

The topography of this place makes for many "secluded islands."

An AM radio station in Homestead, Pennsylvania playing African American music sent out ripples of social change that traveled far beyond the geography of its radio waves.

Porky Chedwick is old now, and there's a dignity and respect awed just for making it. But Porky Chedwick is much loved because he's a good guy. The stories of his giving his last change for bus fare for someone hard up on the street and walking home ring true to his character. Remember Pittsburgh's a hilly place, so walking home isn't easy. Porky is loved for his decency.

Porky began his radio work at WHOD in Homestead in 1956. He was the only white presenter and many probably presumed he was black from his patter and song selections. March is women's history month, and with the mention of WHOD which became WAMO, I thought of Mary Dee, a pioneering African American woman broadcaster at WHOD. I found hardly anything about her online. There's much more about her brother Mal Goode who became the first black TV network correspondent in 1962.

Mal Goode was News Director at WHOD in the fifties. His story is one of decency an community service too. In trying to track down Mary Dee's story, I found some great pages from Philadelphia radio station WDAS. About midway down on that page is a picture of Mary Dee, her brother and others with the caption:

First, apropos the discussion of 'television firsts':
the man on the left is Mal Goode, the first-ever Black reporter on network TV- ABC News to be exact-1962, covering the United Nations. Then, WDAS listeners heard him regularly in the 1970s and '80s as the U-N correspondent for NBN network news. He is also the brother of the lady standing next to him. Mary Dee, a Pittsburgh-to-Philadelphia [WHAT-AM] gospel radio personality who is the mother of Bonnie Dee, [not shown] who worked gospel and traffic at WDAS and Buddy Dee, known to music aficionados as record promotions man par excellence with Universal Distributors and Atlantic Records. And the lady in the hat is WDAS's Bernice Thompson who was a friend of Mary Dee.
[and we hope you got all those connections because there will be a quiz...]

If you've got a little time check out the WDAS pages for some great photos, including photos of the young Ed Bradley.

Radio made a real difference in the quality of life for all Americans. It provided a means for people to express themselves beyond their secluded islands. I think it mattered quite a lot that many of the people involved in Rock and Roll were very decent people concerned about their communities and issues of fairness and justice. As a white kid growing up in South Carolina it made a difference that the music I loved the most was made by African Americans.

One of my friends moved away from the area. She's my favorite dance partner, and everyone's favorite who knows her, sent me a YouTube video, Boogie Shag. Along with the comment, "Now that's dancing." Those in Carolina say that the Carolina Shag predates Swing. In any case there's a fairly straight line from "shagging" at the beach to the radio in Greenville, South Carolina of my youth playing African American music.

The piano player in the video is Silvan Zingg who's Swiss. When I was a kid boogie woogie was what I wanted to play on the piano. I never learned, but the music still makes me dance.

As a kid visiting my very staid grandparents in New England we'd gather in the parlor--off limits most of the time--to enjoy my grandmother play Honky Tonk piano accompanied by by Grandfather on drums. It makes me smile to think my grandfather considered himself a Jazz man. Of course he meant Jazz in the W. C. Handy school. Still, for two rather proper white Yankees, one of their great pleasures in life was music of the African Diaspora.

Zap Mama's album Ancestry in Progress was made in Philadelphia. Marie Daulne is interested in the music of the African Diaspora and I think it cool she went to Philadelphia and not Chicago to make the record. Talking about it she remarks:

You see, as Marie says, the Ancestry this album addresses is not specific to any one people or any one culture. "I'm talking about all the humans who made this world better, their philosophy and their fight. I want my work to show respect for those people. Because I know that tomorrow we're going to be ancestors, and that is the kind of ancestor I want to represent."

I hope Porky Chedwick lives to be 105. If he were to die tomorrow, we'll remember him as the kind of ancestor we want to be.

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Now playing: Frank Zappa - Trouble Every Day
via FoxyTunes want to be.