Subway digging in Lexington

 Neighborhood  Tagged with: , , ,
May 082013
 

By Joseph G. Anthony

Ohio-Street-1WEB

“Ohio Street opened up—300 block, then the 400 block. The powers-that-be would select certain streets or certain areas where we could live.” Amanda Cooper Elliot. Photo by Danny Mayer.

“The past is a foreign country; they did things differently there,” says the narrator in the 1970 movie, The Go-Between.

I certainly hope so.

I wonder if it’s a particularly American trait that the past so quickly becomes first a rumor and then something so dead we view it with the same amazement present-day Romans must feel when they try to extend their subway only to discover yet another lost civilization. But I am not speaking of ancient cities. I’m talking of the lifetime memories of many of our fellow Kentuckians.

I say this because I’ve been researching and writing a novel—Wanted: Good Family—timed mostly in 1948 with long visits to the 1920s. It’s set in Fayette, Scott, and Estill Counties. Three of my narrators are African-American, or—as was the still-respectable and self-applied appellation—colored. My other three narrators are white. My white narrators don’t have an easy time of it: being poor and white in the first half of the century in Kentucky wasn’t, as Bette Davis said of old age, for sissies.  But being poor and colored in Kentucky…well, if they had been Hindu instead of Baptists, they might have wondered just what the hell they had done in those past lives to be faced with so many challenges: spiritual, emotional, physical. Continue reading »

Ensuring terrorists succeed

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May 082013
 

By Marcus Flores

I spent my honeymoon in Curacao, an island in the southern Caribbean quite near Venezuela. Flying by commercial airline in the post-9/11 era entails security procedures that, while mildly inconvenient to some (my wife, for example), constitute civil rights infringements to others. As a libertarian, I think I needn’t bother saying to which camp I belong.

Perhaps it comes with the ideology, but I am also not scared shitless of the .00000004% chance of dying in a terrorist attack. No, what unnerves me is the chance that some drunken airline mechanic fails to notice a leaky hose, or that a recently divorced pilot brings his distractful personal baggage with him into the cockpit. (I am not at all reassured by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report on the Comair Flight 5191 disaster, which listed small talk among the factors that led the pilot down the wrong runway at Bluegrass Airport in 2006.) In short, I hope that more attention is directed at preventable dangers rather than the guy with the beard. Continue reading »

BUILD presses on

 Neighborhood  Tagged with: , , ,
May 082013
 

By Ellen Deatrick

Crowds gather to hear local politicians at the tenth-annual Nehamiah Action Assembly. Photo by Dustin Pugel.

Crowds gather to hear local politicians at the tenth-annual Nehamiah Action Assembly. Photo by Dustin Pugel.

Many people can’t stand to leave things unchecked on a to-do list. Lexington’s BUILD (Building a United Interfaith Lexington through Direct-Action) is not like that. Tuesday, April 16 at their tenth-annual Nehemiah Action Assembly, 1659 people showed up to address three items on the to-do list. The same three that were on there the year before. And the year before: payday lending, affordable housing, and barriers to ex-offender reentry.

BUILD keeps issues on the list until they can rightly be checked off. Such an approach has kept pressure on community officials and has made significant progress on solutions proposed for some of the community’s most pervasive social justice concerns. As Reverend John List put it: “We [BUILD] will drive you crazy with our persistence.” Continue reading »

Sexual entitlement: three vignettes

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May 082013
 

Misadventures in the city

By Beth Connors-Manke

Sometimes persistence is not a virtue. And this guy had it. The first time, he pulled up next to me in a way I could easily ignore as coincidence. When he then did a U-turn and honked at me, I started to get it. My ire flared, but I figured that the complicated maneuver of following me the wrong way down a one-way street would deter him. The issue would be finished. Continue reading »

Remembering Eastern State’s remains

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May 072013
 

NoC interviews Phil Tkacz

Eastern State Hospital Cemetery. Photo by Danny Mayer.

Eastern State Hospital Cemetery. Photo by Danny Mayer.

North of Center sat down with Eastern State Hospital Cemetery Preservation Project president Phil Tkacz to get an update on the mass graves that have been found over the years around the grounds of Eastern State Hospital (soon to become the Bluegrass Community and Technical College Newtown Pike campus) .  On May 14, Tkacz and others will gather to both remember and properly re-bury the remains of a number of the hospital’s former patients.

North of Center: In December 2010, Bruce Burris published an article in North of Center on your attempts to draw public awareness and recognition to a mass grave discovered on the back side of the Eastern State Hospital lot. Bruce described the site as a “tiny spot, not much larger than a typical middle class backyard, [that] contains the remains of between 4,000 and 7,000 people — mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, politicians, shopkeepers, farmers…humans.” He also noted that “these numbers do not include the remains of the many thousands more we believe to be scattered throughout the original ESH property.” Can you update us on what new things you have found since then? Continue reading »

127 years of personhood

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May 062013
 

How a clerk turned corporations into humans

By Joy Arnold

It is claimed by some that 127 years ago, on May 10, 1886, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decided that corporations are people. The claim is not true, though it is hard to imagine a more disastrous impact even if it were: it has been taken for true, with disastrous consequences for the American public.

In the 1880s, Santa Clara County, California, under the state constitution, could tax railroads on their franchise, roadway, railway, rails, and rolling stock. As was its right, the county levied taxes on fences appearing on the Southern Pacific Railroad’s property; at the same time, it did not deduct the amount of the mortgage from the value taxed. When Southern Pacific refused to pay these taxes, the county brought suit in state court.

In response, the railroad had the matter removed to the federal system, where the Federal Court for the Northern District of California agreed with the railroad that the state (or its counties) could not tax fences and must deduct the amount of the mortgage from the taxable value of property. Santa Clara appealed to SCOTUS, where the lower court ruling was affirmed. Continue reading »

Poems from the Central Library

 Neighborhood  Tagged with: , , ,
Apr 052013
 

Poems by Eric Scott Sutherland

Images by Brian Connors Manke

These poems and images appeared with Tony Stilt’s essay, “The Lexington Central Public Library is a home.” All poems will appear in Eric’s forthcoming Accents publication, pendulum.

 

not in the job description

Librarians are almost always very helpful

and often almost absurdly knowledgeable.

WelcomeWEBTheir skills are probably very underestimated

and largely underemployed.

-Charles Medawar

You went to school

to study library science,

to become an ambassador

for letters and literacy.

You love books

and want to help

people read.

You never expected

you’d be directing

people to the bathroom

and telling them

not to fall asleep.

 

have and have-not

In the dim rotunda

two people sit,

inanimate as mannequins.

New-Yorker-MagazineWEBOne is dressed in a slate

three piece uniform.

The other wears a rainbow

of second-hand mismatches.

They watch a pendulum

swing beneath the eye of the sky,

marking the miserable

seconds of the day,

the tick tocks of rat claws

as they race.

In one’s wide dark

pupils, the dream is unattainable.

And in the others the myth is

exposed, hope already lost.

 

fishing for change

lost skipper, Phoenix Park, far from sea

hair grayish green like rocky coast

Pendulum-upWEBmoss tangled under an old sock hat

a body of wire wrapped in a ragged coat

shredded to stuffing and thread

an unlit cigarette hangs between thin lips

a ship tossed in the storm of his beard

every morning voyage passes the pay phone

he casts his finger into the coin return slot

but I have never seen him get lucky

never seen him catch a dime

 

Milkshake Ricky

loves oatmeal cookies

and peanut butter shakes,

dresses in cutoff sweats

over full length

sweats, looks like he flew

out of the cuckoo’s nest,

Freedome-recordsWEBlost four pair of glasses

and two umbrellas

last week.

 

Milkshake Ricky is losing

more than his mind. The way

he fumbles through

layers of worn cotton

searching for his billfold

he may have also

lost what little

money there is left

from his monthly check.

Common Good in the community

 Neighborhood  Tagged with: ,
Apr 052013
 

Youth talent show April 19 at Embrace Church

By Taylor Riley

1, 2, 3… Jump!

I walk past a group of enthusiastic jump-roping children as I search for John and Laura Gallaher.

There are at least 20 kids outside North Limestone’s Embrace United Methodist Church around four p.m. this particular Friday. If I didn’t know any better, I would think these kids were at recess.

School is over for the day, though, and the kids are involved in an after-school program.

I walk inside the church and spot John and Laura rounding up a couple kids for snack time in the basement home of Common Good, the north Lexington non-profit the Gallahers opened last year. Continue reading »

Local cannibal praises Kentucky House Bill 279

 Neighborhood  Tagged with: , , ,
Apr 052013
 

The leek: a satirical take

Illustration by Christopher Epling.

Illustration by Christopher Epling.

Guest editorial by Wilbert Trooghspoon

Socrates. Henry David Thoreau. Mahatma Gandhi. These giants of moral courage inspire us to follow our own deepest convictions, braving even the wrath of the State when integrity puts forth its most exacting demand. Yes, history narrates the battle between the individual human conscience and the State’s gunpoint demand that its subjects march lock-step in its arbitrarily-chosen order. Only in rare moments do we behold a government so enlightened that it elevates its people to their rightful place as free moral agents.  Continue reading »

What’s wrong with generic?

 Neighborhood  Tagged with: , ,
Apr 052013
 

Bloomberg bust, part 2

By Mary Grace Barry

Editor’s note: In part one, Mary Grace assessed the shortcomings of Lexington’s entry in the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge. Here, she examines what that proposal says about how the city sees itself.

Well, we didn’t win. Twice.

Lexington didn’t come out as either the “fan favorite” in the Huffington Post’s people’s choice for the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge or as a real winner chosen by Bloomberg Philanthropies. Bummer.  Continue reading »

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