A few things to do while filling your tank....

My friend and loyal Red Electric reader Mike Ponder sends this story about the latest screen intrusion into our lives—this time coming to your neighborhood gasoline pump.

Mike's alert came to me as I have been studying the Transcendentalists, who would certainly wonder about one question raised by the San Francisco Chronicle article about FuelCast Media Network and its ilk.

FuelCast, a Los Angeles (of course) firm is forcing hundreds of thousands of motorists to watch TV ads beamed right from gas pumps equipped with in-your-face monitors.

Gary LePon, executive vice president of FuelCast, is hardly a modern-day Emerson or Thoreau but his words prompt larger, deeper questions: "There's not much else to do while you're filling your tank. This gives you something to do while you're waiting."

Something to do while you're waiting....

I don't know about you, but I've never had trouble finding something to do while at the gas pump.

I usually have a book or newspaper handy. There's the radio to be listened to. You can always talk to a person next to you, if one is handy.

My interior (my own and my car's) can always use tidying up.

Thinking is an option, as Thoreau and Emerson remind us.

If that's not possible, a tree is usually available for contemplation...and inspiration. Birds, particularly sparrows, often frequent gas stations. I even remember times when I have struck up conversations with service attendants. We still have those here in Oregon.

It's a good thing too, especially if Mr. LePon and his hucksters have their way, as I am certain they will. We can politely tell the attendants to shut off FuelCast's bleating TV monitors.

And if they don't, or, as is more likely, can't ("I just work here.")?

Well, look at the bright side. They and the LePons of the world could be doing everyone a favor without knowing it.

Maybe video muggings at the gas pump will persuade us to do what we should be doing anyway—driving less, and a lot sooner.

Charter commission's composition pre-determined revisions

One big reason the recommendations of the 25-member Mayor’s Charter Review Commission ignored the interests of neighborhoods may be that only two members were identified with neighborhoods.

Here are the two, as they were listed the official résumés accompanying the press announcement of commission members:

Jillian Detweiler. Employed by TriMet, she has served as an assistant to former City Commissioner Charlie Hales, and is a past board member of the Southeast Uplift and Brooklyn Neighborhood Association.

Robin Plance. A maintenance supervisor, he has served with the Gresham Optimist Club; St. Johns Neighborhood Association Board and Portland Harbor Community Advisory Group.

And that’s it.

The other 23 commissioners were seemingly appointed for their trade or labor affiliations, ethic group, non-profit work etc.

All well and good, but when it came time to offer some form of representation for neighborhoods in a new charter, the overwhelming majority had little reason to speak up. And they didn’t.

This is why jury selection is so important in determining verdicts.

It should have come as no surprise that the verdict of the charter commission would exclude neighborhood (and neighborhood coalition) representation and power from a new city council.

Local art auctions for nuclear warheads?

On Saturday night, after countless hours of volunteer work to organize a benefit auction, receipts-counters reported that Multnomah Arts Center volunteers grossed more than $26,000 at the "Give the Arts a Hand" auction attended by 240 patrons.

Coincidentally, over the weekend, we US taxpayers learned that the Bush Administration is asking Congress to spend hundreds of millions (and ultimately billions in classified "Black Budget" funds) to "upgrade" our (yes, OUR) nuclear arsenal. All the better to warm the globe with.

Lest we forget, these weapons are thousands (millions?) of times more lethal than the dread weapons of mass destruction that the Bush Administration claimed justified our invasion of Iraq.

But then we do have to keep those defense industry profiteers happy, don't we?

I was reminded of the bumper sticker that says something to the effect: "What if we held bake sales to build ABMs, and adequately funded our schools?"

Which raises another one of my favorite questions: Is there intelligent life on Earth?

There most certainly isn't in the White House.

But I digress...

At the same benefit auction was Portland Parks Director Zari Santner, whose underlings have put forward a proposal to sell naming rights to Portland parks facilities in order to sustain them.

Note: The Multnomah Arts Center is a parks facility.

I know Zari socially and didn't want to blemish her evening at a social event by restating my opposition to the proposal.

But it seemed to me that by simply selling off the naming rights to the arts center to, say, Waste Management or 1-800-Got-Junk?, we might be able to forgo the need for annual auctions.

So I asked an exhausted auction volunteer near and dear to me whether she would be willing to sell off the name of the arts center to be free of organizing the auction.

Zari take note: Her answer was an unqualified "NO!"

Lettera 32 Down Under

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A few posts back I mentioned Christina Wall, a Michigan graduate student, who has discovered the joys of using an Olivetti Lettera 32.

Now comes news via one of my typewriter forums that Matthew Smeal, a photo-journalist in Sidney, Australia, is similarly smitten.

Enjoy his photos as well. Be sure to make the connection between excellent photography and an eye for elegant design.

A man with a candle in the rain

Friday evening was cold, wet and gusty. Still, he decided to make his way to the busy intersection of Capitol Highway and Sunset Boulevard to stake out his candle-holding, placard-waving place on the northwest corner next to the crosswalk signal.

Being there helped sustain the six-week-old Friday night peace vigils.

He was alone on the corner, but across Capitol were four others, and he could see his friend Joan catty corner from him with her battery-powered string of lights and her rainbow-striped peace banner.

The Hillsdale peace vigil was small on this nasty night, but its spirit was alive.

The weather cut through his raincoat. He really should have put on another layer of clothes. The wind whipped the rain around him, soaking his jeans. The little candle in the jar blew out three times, and the matches grew moist making it harder to spark a flame.

But the more miserable he became the more he thought of the true misery of war, the fear, the agony, the death, the destruction, the hatred.

The vigil’s small but palpable discomforts fed his resolve to oppose war—to “Wage Peace,” as his placard proclaimed,

A stranger bearing a bulky camera suddenly appeared next to him and asked whether he had another candle. The one he was holding had gone out, again. He thought the stranger, who introduced himself as Joe—Joe Cantrell—wanted to hold one himself, but it turned out he wanted to take a photo.

Joe is drawn to taking photos with a social message. He had been driving home in the busy, rain-splattered commute and spotted the soaked, slightly stooped figure cupping a glowing candle, balancing a placard at his feet, and somehow managing to keep an umbrella canted over his head.

Now Joe wondered whether the sodden man could light the candle again because he wanted to record what he had seen.

Here it is.

Discuss charter change proposal HERE

After Thursday's post I sent some 20 neighborhood activists (neighboristas?) an e-mail inviting their views on whether the proposed charter revision would help neighborhoods.

That has prompted a lively, fascinating debate. Unfortunately none of the comments has made it onto this site. So I'm writing the respondents again to encourage them to comment here. That way everyone can follow the thread.

Feel free to join in. Here's most of what I wrote:

Last night I wrote a Red Electric entry in which I said the proposed charter revision has bungled an opportunity to give neighborhoods a much-needed seat at the table of
city government.

If I vote for the charter revision, it won't be with the hope that it will help us in Hillsdale. It could even make matters worse.

I'm wondering what you are thinking.

Rick

"Screens" redefine human experience

For the past three years I have helped organize TV Turnoff Week activities in Southwest Portland as part of my involvement with the Northwest Media Literacy Center.

During that time, though, our concerns have extended beyond television—so much so that the national TV Turnoff organization has changed its name to “The Center for Screen-Time Awareness.”

Our society is now at the point where we are subjected to screens literally from cradle to grave. No one has actually started to market casket screens for the departed but anything is possible, especially if there’s a buck to be made.

Last year I stopped shopping at Albertson’s when the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway store hung screens over the check-out lines. “Enough with the screens already,” I wrote “corporate.” A PR functionary wrote back that it was all an experiment and, anyway, I was the only person to complain.

I responded that I had other choices for where to spend my money, and in the future I would shop where I wasn’t treated as just another captive in a media demographic to be exploited. Moreover, I wrote, I would urge others to do the same. (You can complain to Albertson’s by calling 1-877-932-7948.)

Within the last few days three “screen” stories have appeared like separate dots in the mediascape. Connecting them is an exercise in screen-time awareness.

Two were from today’s newspapers. The first, on the front page of The Oregonian, reported on young teen “Party Boys” performing dancing so obscene that it drove girls subjected to it to tears and led to arrests for sexual abuse. The grotesque behavior by the McMinnville boys was modeled on a scene in the movie “Jackass.”

After the boys were arrested, one of their fathers complained that the arrests and incarcerations in the juvenile home were unnecessary. “I could have handled it myself. He listens to me,” said the father, who, like millions of other parents, obviously didn’t have a clue.

The New York Times business section today ran a story about how the Albertson’s experience has metastasized to malls, Wal-Marts and even shopping carts and gas pumps—any place drawing mass “audiences.” One mother is quoted as saying that that screens in malls captivate her children. “If it’s showing a preview of a movie they want to see, I can’t get them away from it.”

“…can’t get them away from it”? Welcome to parenting in the 21st Century. Who’s in charge here?

Finally, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that 43 percent of babies under the age of one are watching TV, and that programmers at Disney and Sesame Street are actively targeting them. Media marketeers are told by their researchers that brand-awareness and bonding is possible before infants even learn to talk.

As reported in the Washington Post, there is an entire 24-hour network aimed at babies. It’s called “BabyFirstTV,” and it blatantly counters the recommendation of the American Academy of Pediatrics that children younger than two should watch no—that’s zero—TV.

Any expert in child development will tell you that the very young need the warm sensory interaction they get from parents. They also need to freely explore three-dimensional space in order to connect with the real world.

Hour upon hour of ubiquitous screen time is literally redefining, and confining, what it means to be human. It is blocking us from seeing and experiencing the world as it is.

Screen-time awareness, indeed! We absolutely must get a grip on our media consumption. We must consciously limit screen time and critically assess the time we and our children spend with media.

Finally, I have submitted media literacy legislation to State Senator Ginny Burdick and State Representatives Mary Nolan and Larry Galizio. It calls on schools to teach media literacy to our children.

I urge you and your friends to write these three lawmakers to support the legislation.

Charter revision bungles chance for change

If the Hillsdale neighborhood has an action agenda right now, these are its principle items—in no particular order:

• Creating a sheltered and inviting home for the Hillsdale Farmers Market.

• Undergrounding unsightly utilities in Hillsdale.

• Making a safe Capitol Highway pedestrian crossing at the nascent Watershed housing building in Hillsdale.

• Creating an attractive civic plaza.

• Expanding Hillsdale’s DeWitt Park and giving it a public presence on Sunset Boulevard.

• Building sidewalks so that our children can walk to school safely.

• Hiring a part-time staffer to implement our Town Center Plan (and the plans of other town centers in Portland.)

For the past few months (years?), many of us in Hillsdale have implored the city’s bureaucracy and elected commission to take action on these matters.

We have struggled in vain.

I had held out some hope that a proposed charter revision would help end the impasse.

The proposal being put to the voters on the May ballot would substitute a new “strong mayor/city administrator” form of governance for the present “commission” one.

From the neighborhoods’ perspective, there’s not a tinker’s damn worth of difference between the two.

The same City Hall culture that gives lip service to the neighborhoods (and tilts to downtown interests) has created this “revision.”

The charter review commission did nothing to recognize, legitimize and institutionalize neighborhoods as the keys to making Portland a dynamic, creative place of citizen involvement and governance.

The strength of any city is an involved citizenry. Any new charter should nurture and infuse that involvement in the city’s governance by creating a much larger, neighborhood-accountable, neighborhood-elected commission.

Frankly, I’m on the verge of giving up on city reform and advocating for something radically different.

When I share Hillsdale’s goals with those in the know, they tell me that Woodburn or Lake Oswego or Tigard have achieved many of them.

Well, Woodburn, Lake Oswego and Tigard are incorporated, independent towns that don’t answer to the City of Portland.

You can see where this is going. And, yes, I’m not sure I want to go there either, but I think breaking free is well worth considering.

And I do know this: Portland is a city in civic peril until it empowers its neighborhoods—and engages its citizens.