Cocoposts

Wildflower Trains

So the San Francisco Chronicle is all uplifty this morning with wee less prominent shooting news and this travel piece about trains and wildflowers - silent commentary maybe on the state of trains for actual travel. 

Travel is not why we would be caught dead getting out of the pick-up and taking the train in America - its the scenery!  Confirming this is that all but one of these trains are vintage - quaint remnant routes of a real rail network.

We think we're so damned advanced and high-tech, but here it is 2009 and I can't take a train from Albuquerque to Denver or El Paso.*  That would be unheard of 100 years ago. 

KB Home CEO Admired, Arraigned

Bruce Karatz gets arraigned today.   From the Los Angeles Times comes a lot of apologetic talk from his friends, including the former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan.  Some people will love rich people (and their money) no matter what they do.  This bit too:

"Bruce was instrumental in making decisions for the institution that had profound and positive long-term consequences," said Steven Leder, Wilshire's senior rabbi and author of "More Money Than God," a book that promises to tell readers about "living a rich life without losing your soul." "He is someone I can always turn to for advice." ...

Reinventing Cities

Nicolai Ouroussoff addresses the future of cities in the New York Times.   It is in the Art and Design section - which sort of illustrates marginalization of the topic of cities and urbanism. 

The problem in America is not a lack of ideas. It is a tendency to equate any large-scale government construction project, no matter how thoughtful, with the most brutal urban renewal tactics of the 1950s.

One result has been that pioneering projects that skillfully blend basic infrastructure with broader urban needs like housing and park space are usually killed in their infancy.

Another is that we now have an archaic and grotesquely wasteful federal system in which upkeep for roads, subways, housing, public parkland and our water supply are all handled separately.

Powell's Portland

NYTs has this bleak story about the economy featuring the Powells of Powell's Books in Portland Oregon (where the fisherman nephew chemist now lives).  The economy is all downturny (had you heard?) and they won't be expanding the bookstore. 

I just love the picture of Michael Powell and daughter Emily.

My brother died a year ago today.  This sort of reminds me of him and my doctor niece.  (Today EVERYTHING will remind me of him.)

Big Dog Reading

Big Dog has matured into a beautiful beast since his puppyhood three years ago.   He has stopped chewing rugs.  Thank God.  He went through about 4 Navajo saddle blankets and the edges of 3 Persians.  He also chewed novels and photograph albums. I dreamed he was in a book club with Humpy the neighborhood Chihuahua. 

Slow, Easy, Cheap and Green

I like this guy's approach - Slow Gardening.  Mr. Felder Rushing has a radio show - The Gestalt Gardener - in Oxford Mississippi.  From the New York Times Home and Garden section.

 At first glance, Mr. Rushing’s yard décor strikes a visitor as a maximalist hodgepodge of salvaged materials and junky doodads. There are several bottle trees (one is made of Bud Light bottles) and rusty I-beams stuck in the ground. ...  The entire space is encased by a fence of corrugated tin designed to thwart rubberneckers. “I’m not a snob, but I’m outside in my bathrobe a lot, and in the mornings I look like Jesus’ drunk brother,” he said. ...

Dried broomsedge, an ornamental grass, had a prominent place in the front of his garden, a drab clump amid the verdant green.  Mr. Rushing was asked if he planned to tear it out and replant. He considered it a moment, and gave a slow gardening response: “My way of thinking right now is brown is a color, too.”

Circus Dreams

NYTs notes Ringling Brothers Circus 139th edition comes to Madison Square Garden and covers the economic downturn and animal rights angles.*  Turns out the circus owner, Feld Entertainment, is very diversified and also does monster truck shows and drag racing so no economic worries.  Sigh.

The paper links to Buckles Blog by Buckles Woodcock, a retired elephant trainer who I'm certain I knew in my last life  and this description of the elephants emerging from Queens-Midtown Tunnel: 

 "It's very magical. The tunnel is pretty quiet with that eerie echo effect. You hear the elephants snorting and the horses' hooves on the ground. But the big payoff is when you come out of that tunnel."

Thousands of people gather at 35th St. and Second Ave. to cheer the animals as they exit the murky depths of the East River. With the New York Police Department acting as crowd control, the elephants head down to 34th St. before venturing west.

"That's the most exciting moment of the year," said Griggs. "A herd of elephants walking in the middle of Manhattan just doesn't happen every day. People are going to get a closer look at our elephants than any zoo in America."

Photo from Buckles on flickr

*One of my recurring circus dreams involves chasing naked protesters through deep sawdust and forgetting the total number of big white horses in my care.  

Ranchito Coco

Here are 3 things - prominent topics on this here five year- old blog - about land development:

    * What we do to land.
    * How real estate passes for an industry and relates to the larger economy.
    * What passes for land use planning and how it relates to real estate.

I also spend a lot of time considering how anything about any of this or that or the other really really matters.  But that's too many bullets.  

Somewhat ironically,  I'm  learning about my own little real estate development project which, so far, entails an expensive driveway, elm clearance and not unexpected disruption of  the resident raccoon population who have yet to accept their newfound status as livestock within my expanding ranchito fenceline.  (Before and during construction photos of new Louise Lane at Ranchito Coco.)

Houston, We Have Sprawl

From the New York Times - Stimulus Ideals in Conflict on the Texas Prairie

Texas plans to spend $181 million of its federal stimulus money on building a 15-mile, four-lane toll road — from Interstate 10 to Highway 290 and right through the prairie — that will eventually form part of an outer beltway around greater Houston called the Grand Parkway.

The road exemplifies an unintended effect of the stimulus law: an administration that opposes suburban sprawl is giving money to states for projects that are almost certain to exacerbate it.

Real Estate Doomer

Being called a doomer is harsher perhaps than being called a no-growther, which is what Joe Monahan or one of his cocodrilo calls members of the Atrisco Land Grant who opposed the TIDD bill.  Joe deftly suggests all the reasons the bill might have failed without touching on any shortcomings or facts about the legislation.  Sidebar ad is not talking.  Joe did say SunCal may have "overplayed their hand."  And that's an understated fact at least. 

Just read Kunstler's Clusterfuck post from March 9th, ancient history in bloggy time. 

At the risk of confirming my critics' dumbest charge -- that I am a "doomer" -- the mandate of clarity requires me to ask: to what state of affairs do we expect to recover? If the answer is a return to an economy based on building ever more suburban sprawl, on credit card over-spending, on routine securitized debt shenanigans in banking, and on consistently lying to ourselves about what reality demands of us, then we are a mortally deluded nation. We're done with that, we're beyond that now, we've crossed the frontier and left that all behind, and we'd better get our heads straight about it.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.  We should get our heads twisty about it.