My Quiet Life

Aunt B is a recent twitter convert and not really getting it. I confess I am still sorta borderline myself. But, I have a long history of scoffing at innovative ideas early on and then looking like an idiot later. When Mirabilis came out with ICQ, my friend Nick showed it to me. “Hey cool,” he said, “you can message people in realtime!!” “Big deal,” I scoffed, scoffingly, “there’s a little thing called talk(1) in UNIX that has existed practically forever.”

So, twitter has been something recently I’ve been trying to keep an open mind about. What is it? Wikipedia says: Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application. Okay, but. What is it, really?

I think of twitter as basically a web-based chatroom where you have everyone on ignore by default. The interesting thing about it is that not everyone thinks of it that way. Some people treat it as microblogging and only visit it periodically. Conversely, some people have twitter piped right to their IM client and treat it as another form of instant messaging. (Interestingly, I have a feeling these people annoy the piss out of the former folks.) So far, I’m ambivalent. It’s cool every once in a while for rapid dissemination of information, or relaying info to a person but giving other people an opportunity to comment on it. Like I said, it’s like a web-based chatroom that can be piped into other mediums (email, web, XMPP/jabber, SMS, etc). I use it primarily via jabber, but the trick is knowing when to shut it off. When I’m heads-down working at the office, I just can’t handle the deluge of updates on who’s drinking what caffeineated beverage at the moment or whatever.

You can also discriminate who you get IM notifications from and who you don’t, which is sortof nice. So, in conclusion, I think it’s a neat technology — the crux of it being that it’s basically a method for disseminating information through a gateway that makes it available in whatever medium you want: IM, SMS, Web, etc. The only problem with it I see is that it’s centralized in one commercial entity. And that it can get really annoying. But I’m learning that the trick is realizing you can control fairly well what you don’t get, what you do get, and how you get it.

Welp, Kucinich is out. Edwards is out. I can officially stop paying attention until after the conventions. Can anyone tell me why we even bother to have primaries in the rest of the states? The meme for this election is “change”, eh? Shyah.

I just hope Ron Paul sticks it out long enough that I can vote for him in the primary. Apocalypse 2008! woohoo!

Now that the election is actually in full swing, I think it might be a good time for everyone to go read this article on John McCain.

It could be my imagination, but it seems like I’ve noticed a severe uptick lately in homeless alcoholics around town drinking mouthwash.. While the increase is merely anecdotal, it does make me wonder if more stores downtown are bowing to pressure and refusing individual beer sales on their own. Mouthwash, of course, is an unsavory but effective source of alcohol for alcoholics with no other recourse. I know that there’s been a lot of pressure from neighborhood groups in downtown and east Nashville to ban individual sales of alcoholic beverages. Ideally this effort would be founded in a desire to help homeless people struggling with a terrible addiction. In practice, I think it has more to do with the residents of downtown being annoyed at the individual cans and 40oz bottles found around town. Whatever the intent, the effort is misguided at best.

Here’s the thing about alcoholism: it’s an addiction. When someone battling this sort of addiction is unable to get a beer, they don’t shrug, think “oh well” and go home for a good night’s sleep, off on their merry way to being a more productive member of society. No, they move on to the next best thing. Mouthwash, rubbing alcohol, Sterno (so-called “canned heat”), Brut. You name it. We use alcohol for a lot of things, and these various forms of denatured alcohol appear in a multitude of readily available products. They are unsavory, unhealthy, and sometimes downright poisonous. But severe alcoholics can and do turn to these sources of alcohol, which are perfectly legal to sell.

The next thing that I think a lot of people fail to realize about alcoholism is that it’s a severe physiological addiction. The symptoms of withdrawal are more than a mere annoyance or challenge. Everyone has heard of “the shakes”, or Delerium Tremens. This is more than the nervous twitch of an addict looking for his next fix — it’s a severe physiological reaction involving disorientation, confusion, paranoia, seizures, and (in 35% of untreated cases) death. For severe alcoholics (a significant portion of which are homeless), getting alcohol in their system day by day can literally be a matter of life and death.

So, the answer to alcoholism among the homeless (which, I should note, is a sizeable but not dominating perentage) is not as simple as a cold-turkey, “pull yourself up from your boot-straps” type solution. It’s just not, sorry. More creative and rational approaches are necessary — such as this one in Ottawa. While I commiserate with the good intentions of wanting to institute a ban on individual alcoholic beverage sales, there’s a good case to be made that it could make things tremendously worse.

I think this woman is my new hero:

Appropos of nothing:

Obama: The system sucks, but I’m so awesome that it’ll melt away before me.
Edwards: The system sucks, and we’re gonna have to fight like hell to destroy it.
Clinton: The system sucks, and I know how to work within it more than anyone.

I liked this summary — and, in a nutshell, it explains succinctly why I prefer Edwards. I am thinking about voting for him in the primary. I am a little tired of pissing in the wind, which unfortunately is about what a vote for Kucinich amounts to.

I haven’t really blogged about politics in a while, but.. Recently, my friend Nick received a press release from Bill Hobbs about the lottery. Knowing my history of disagreement with hobbs, he asked me what I thought about it. Rather than just respond via e-mail I figured I’d blog about it here. This is gonna be brief, since I don’t really find the lottery to be that complicated an issue. Specifically, he’s responding to Larry Daughtrey, who wrote in the Tennessean:

The demographics of lotteries are well known: the poor buy the most tickets and the middle and upper classes get most of the scholarships. The Democrats want to make money available on the basis of need; Republicans, none of whom voted for the lottery in the first place, want to hold the line.

Hobbs responds:

That issue is this: Democrats for the most part want to lower academic standards for getting a scholarship. Right now a student must graduate high school with a B average to get a scholarship; Democrats want to lower that to a C average, presumably making thousands more students eligible for the scholarships, which will soak up more lottery revenue.

First, a minor quibble: in referring to the lottery money’s application, Hobbs says it will “soak up more revenue”? “Soak up” here is a weasely synonym for “use”. What’s up with that? “Soak up” implies that it’s being wasted somehow. What else would we use it for? That’s what the lottery is supposed to be for, right?

Second, Hobbs’ main contention is that the lottery revenue scholarships serve as a significant incentive for high school students to keep their grades up — and turning it into an entitlement program will eliminate this incentive. That may be so, but frankly, it seems a bit unlikely that the lottery poses any real incentive for high school students. The stratification of student performance in our schools runs far deeper than mere grades — falling mainly along (surprise) class lines. So, I think these scholarships are unlikely to be a truly significant factor swinging things here.

Republicans understand that turning the program into an entitlement program puts taxpayers on the hook should the number of needs-based students ever eclipse the lottery’s revenue.

This seems to be a premature assumption — an entitlement program can be budgeted like anything else, can’t it? There’s no need to make commitments to anything that would have to put “taxpayers on the hook”.

Lastly, but most importantly, he sidesteps the primary point of Daughtrey’s analysis entirely — that the lottery is basically a conveyor belt of money from the lower class to the middle and upper classes via college scholarships. Hobbs sidesteps this contention by simply blowing it off as “tired old class-warfare rhetoric”. It’s difficult to ignore, however, the enormous and well-established bodies of evidence that a lottery is one of the most regressive forms of revenue-generation there is. It’s morally bankrupt and not worth defending on either side of the political aisle.

There’s some interesting discussion here that I find fascinating. It’s worth reading, if you can get over the self-importance of some of the posts. (As my friend Melissa put it, it’s like some of them are going to the zoo.) The debate centers on the ethics of photographing homeless people, in general. Standard ethics and most jurisdictions of law operate on the principle that basically photographing anyone in public is fair game. They have no expectation of privacy, yadda yada. The interesting argument in this thread is that for a homeless person, public spaces are their home — they have nowhere else to go. So is it still ethical to take their picture without asking permission?

Living downtown, naturally, I’ve been exposed to Nashville’s growing homeless problem — as any reader of my blog knows, since I practically never shut up about it. I’ve tried, with varying levels of success (read: not much) to find time to get involved — either merely arguing about it on the internet or trying to volunteer when I can. But one thing I’ve never really done much of is photography of homeless people. I’ve never felt quite right about it. But let me back up.

It all started even before I really got into photography too seriously, and I ran across someone that had some pictures of homeless people around Nashville on flickr. I wish I could find it, but there was one (very good!) portrait of a particular guy that I recognized. The comments on the flickr pic were hilarious. They were all like “I can see the pain in his eyes” or “that face probably has a million stories to tell!! stoic and full of pride!!” and all this other bullshit. This is hilarious, of course, because I recognized the guy. I was like “stoic and full of pride?? That’s the guy that spit at me cus I didn’t give him money last week.” I mean, not that I don’t have compassion for the guy, but the utter wankery in these comments just totally turned me off. It took me a long time to really put my finger on what it specifically was that bothered me about it. Over the last few years I’ve seen the work that goes into advocacy for homeless issues, and the work done by people that are actually out there working for change. So, when I increasingly run across people taking pictures of homeless people and effusively glowing about how they really “connected” with them, it strikes me as a little hypocritical. It’s easy to ask a homeless dude his name and take his picture with your fancy digital camera and go home to your warm bed feeling really good about yourself because you actually talked to a homeless person and then showing everyone your soulful portrait. It’s a lot harder to do something that actually effects change. There’s one guy in that thread:

Many times the homeless people I photograph have a little jar or cup in front of them. This may sound unethical itself, but usually combined with a few words some loose change will make them realize you are not against them. This is usually their main concern.

Yeah, you’re a real humanitarian, dude. Anyways, so skip forward to today, where I’ve been increasingly experimenting with different forms of photography.. trying to have fun and learn about them all. Recently I’ve been trying my hand at some street photography. Street photography is a wide umbrella, and I suppose it depends on what you want to do with it. I’m also intently following the turf war in Nashville between advocates for the homeless and the encroaching upper-class that wants them gone, basically. It angers me when I talk to people that talk about how homeless people “have no excuse” because there’s “ample help” available — while I’m seeing people sleeping on the street in the cold, and they all tell me the same thing: there’s nowhere to go. The rescue mission is full, and abysmally run to boot. But it’s one thing to argue about this on the Internet, and another to just .. take a picture of it. Maybe it’d be harder to argue with. I had my camera with me (surprise!) the night that I ran across the metro park rangers herding a group of homeless people sleeping at riverfront out of the park. When I asked one of the guys where they were told to go, he just shrugged. It’s a picture of this sort of thing going on that’s hard to argue with, and sometimes I think this is the sort of thing I want to capture. (As it happens, the few pictures I did try to take that night were woefully underexposed because I was trying to use a new camera mode at the time.)

So, anyways. I don’t really know where I was going with this. I am just thinking out loud. The homeless people are undeniably a part of the neighborhood I live in — I feel like it’s something I want to capture somehow, but I am not sure how, and I am not sure how I feel about the ethics involved. My friend Melissa’s take is that basically you should just ask someone’s permission to take their picture in general. No dilemma. I am mostly inclined to agree — I think it’s common courtesy. But there is a sortof aspect of photography that is about capturing a moment that is irreconcilable with actually asking for permission. This picture, for example, or this one. I had reservations even about posting these, but in these cases, I think it’s a little different. It’s not so much the person that is the subject of the photograph but their condition — the moment. And obviously asking for permission to take the picture is not compatible since you’d have to … wake them up.

Last night when I was out wandering around some dude on the corner stopped me.. “hey that’s a nice picture camera you got.. hey listen i don’t mean no harm etc etc but i just need a buck if you could help me out, you can do anything you want.. take my picture whatever.. just help me out”. It’s like.. when faced with that level of desperation, how can you feel like you’re really doing anything worthwhile? How do you take someone’s picture after that and not just feel totally dirty and exploitive? It’s an interesting dilemma, and something I find myself thinking about a lot.

So, the final vote on the “aggressive panhandling” bill is tonight. (Some background, including my stance on the whole thing can be found here). I just got e-mail from Skip Courtney, president of the URA, sent to the Metro council.

I know each of you already is aware of this, but hopefully my reminder will serve to attach a special beacon to this critical bill. As President of the Urban Residents Association, I represent a special group of pioneers who have taken a considerable risk to repopulate the downtown core of Nashville.

…

As pioneers, we understand that there will be challenges to overcome.

…

We also represent a new class of citizens who spend time in the downtown core.

Ow. I think I just sprained my eyeballs from excessive eyerolling. It goes on like that. “Special group of pioneers”?? Give me a break. He’s right at least that they represent a class of citizens, but it’s not a new one. Here we have a group of upper-middle class people repopulating a formerly destitute urban area, panicking at the mere sight of actual homeless people, and resorting to government authority to ban public behaviour, and still managing to be a martyr about it. Only in America. Sometimes I think the members of the URA need a field trip over to east Nashville or Hope Gardens. A friend of mine was woken up last night by some dude screaming and bleeding all over the sidewalk.

There are organizations and individuals who would have you believe that this is an unfair bill that targets the homeless, but that is simply not true. For those who truly need help in this city and seek it, it is readily available.

This is perhaps the more infuriating part of the whole situation. The blase disregard for the reality that help is not readily available is frustrating. I would encourage Skip and others living downtown to investigate a little further the resources that are “readily available” to the homeless in Nashville, rather than relying on the skimpy claims of the downtown partnership’s glossy slicks.

I swear, after we fix the downtown panhandling “problem”, we’re gonna need an enormous civic undertaking to clean up after all the massive pantswetting flooding the area.

So, finally done with project365. It was tremendously helpful to me, I think. I am not sure if I’ll keep it up, but I’ll probably take a picture a day regardless. Slideshow below (fullscreen):

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