Pegulaville

Buffalo Sabres owner Terry Pegula has been anointed prime developer of the Webster Block in downtown Buffalo.  It’s a great plot of land, a pivot point between the waterfront and the arena in which the Sabres play professional hockey.

Dubbed Harborcenter, the $123 million plan comprises two ice rinks (set 60-feet above street level), a 200-room hotel, restaurant, retail space and parking, all interconnected, like a Habitrail for humans.

It’s brilliant.  There is nothing else like it in North America.  A hockey mecca, capable of attracting all kinds of icy tournaments.  The idea actually builds on Buffalo’s strengths, rather than plow over its weaknesses.  It’s such a great idea I think we should think even farther outside the rink.

Let’s give Pegula the rest of the city, too. 

America, this wondrous melting pot, thrives on diversity.  A free market, with a democratic counter-weight, the republic was called forth by the voice of the people.  That does not mean that everywhere, all the time, in this great land, we need a freely elected government.  We are big and strong enough to handle a little pocket monarchy here or there. 

I say we make Terry Pegula Lord of Buffalo.  Let him rule over the city, first ward to Hertel, West Side to East, and see what he can do with the thing.  It won’t be that much different from the Griffin administration, just a little more honest about the structure.  It’s not completely unprecedented, either.  Native Americans have nations within our nation from sea to shinning sea. 

Terry Pegula seems clever, industrious and loves the city.  What else could you ask of a leader?  With one stroke we cut down the infighting, competing fiefdoms, petty political parries and thrusts.  No more deflections.  One ruler, one person responsible, maybe one unified step forward.

Besides, if we don’t like it, we revolt. It’s all the rage now. A Buffalo Spring.  

Writer and Chief

Regardless of what you think of Barak Obama as a president or a person, he is a very talented writer.  Last night’s acceptance speech proved, again, that the man knows how to string and sling words.  While Bill Clinton maybe more entertaining - more sly and folksy - Obama can work both the quip and the long arc.  Those are two very different skills and he displayed prowess with both in Charlotte.

Modern media demands tiny bites of information.  The fewer words the better.  No words, best of all.  If the media can stir you with a photo, they’ll leave it at that.  Internet memes, 140-character tweets, everything in the world crammed into 60-seconds of superficial blasts designed not so that you understand, but so that you’ll keep watching, listening or reading.  It makes the job of a politician very hard.  They have to sway you with quick, digestible mouthfuls.  Master chefs proving their worth with only hors d'oeuvres.  Obama preformed this task with aplomb.

“Feel a cold coming on? Take two tax cuts, roll back some regulations, and call us in the morning!”  Quick and potent.

“We’re making things again.” Substantive.

“I’m the President.”  It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

What impresses me, though, is how good Obama is at the long arc.  He moved his speech from endearing to dower to uplifting, never veering or wobbling.  It was a complete tour of everything he needed to get across. 

It was also one of the least arrogant speeches ever heard at a political convention.  He didn’t shy from touting this administration’s accomplishments, but he punctuated and pivoted the speech with this line:

“I’m far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, “I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.”

After speaking of how humbling the presidency can be, he reflected his successes back on the populace, the people that elected him four years ago.  The credit for whatever good the Obama admiration has done was not trumpeted, it was given to us.  You don’t get that from every podium.

I naturally think being a decent writer is the perfect test for being a decent president.  Writers continuously balance their needs with the needs of others, dealing with the realities of economy, message, sales and accessibility.  Be creative, but not too creative.  Be clever, but not too clever.  Give the public what it wants, only better.  And you only get words with which to do it. 

If writing well has anything to do with governing well, well . . . I was going to vote that way for all kinds of other reasons, too.  This just makes it easier.

Oh, that we could vote Ann Romney

Ann Romney’s speech at the Republican Convention convinced me that we’ve got the wrong Romney on the ticket.  Not only is she a much more engaging and convincing speaker than her husband, I think she’s better qualified to be president.

Thank about it.  She’s successfully run a multi-million dollar household for 43 years.  She’s managed the interests of six divergent, high achieving males, keeping them safe, moving them forward, on a budget.  Sure, it might have been a big budget, but so is America’s. 

It always irritates me when people say the U.S. should be run like a business.  It’s not anything like a business.  It was not created to maximize profit.  You can’t sell off the Coast Guard because it’s not producing.  The U.S.A. is much more like a family.  Maybe we should be looking for someone with that kind of experience.

In running a household like the Romney’s you don’t have direct control over income.  Mitt’s doing that.  Your job is to keep the family functioning, not profiting.  There is no up-side to sickness.  Food and travel are lost costs.  You can’t fire one of your kids.  You can’t split, divest or outsource.  You simply can’t do many of the things venture capitalists do to create wealth.

Compassion, understanding, compromise – it’s a shame our political system doesn’t reward what we actually need in our leaders.

Review: The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows

Something for everyone.  That is one of those phrases that’s both a come-on and a warning.  It’s a solid pitch, but to the savvy it can mean mediocrity.  There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ in anything, especially art and literature.  Mostly.  Brian Castner’s The Long Walk: A Story of Warand the Life That Follows is so fully open and honest that it really does have something for everyone, because it’s about everything.

And not everything as in throw enough spaghetti against a wall and some is bound to stick.  This memoir is about a man’s life after returning from war and how his experiences ripple through each moment and all concerned.  It is enlightening, up-lifting, spooky, funny and sad.  Never in that order and all the time. 

I loved the book for its details and its completeness, but I love a lot of books that I never bother to write about.  This one is special.  I like literature that focuses a spotlight on people, places and troubles.  This book does the opposite.  It shines a huge arc lamp on entire life, glaring, unfocused and subsequently quite illuminating.   

Ode to a shed

I had to tear my shed down this weekend and it brought a tear to my eye. In the interest of full disclosure, I cried at The Hunger Games, each American Girl movie I got suckered into watching, and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Every year since 1966, excepting a few when I was a teenager and too cool. I do not, however, normally maintain inordinately fond attachments to inanimate objects. I don’t name my cars. I didn’t think twice about moving from my last home.

 But this house, and this shed, have been different. We settled it in the Fall, a few months later my father died at 64, in a swirl of unfulfilled potential and a few months after that I built a shed, specifically to fulfill a potential.

 Some people have dream homes. I had the dream of owning a home that required the purchase of a small tractor. I am now, and have been for several years, living the dream. Various projects around the house generated excess lumber and the tractor deserved a home of its own, so I decided to construct one. Believing that plans – like those story synopses in operatic playbills – preclude excitement, I set out my wood, purchased some more and started building a shed.

I soon realized that the best way maximize use of my materials and minimize cuts would be to make a cube. 10 x 10 x 10. This would result in an object of beauty, a pantheon to originality. With a flat roof. I live on an island north a Buffalo, NY. If you are not familiar with the climate of the northeastern Americas, let my just say, most people prefer a roof that encourages snow and rain to slide to the side. I liked the cube, so rather than form a peak, I decided to cant the whole building.

I loved this design. Bold. Unique. I didn’t even mar it with a door. I fashioned a secret panel, with a catch hidden in the bottom. The shed stood like a brown monolith, as if Kubrick had decided to do a woodsy version of 2001 A Space Odyssey. Yes, the roof sagged and I had to install center supports, which barely left room for the tractor. And yes, it leaked like disgruntled middle managers, passed over yet again. Still, a big nut-color cube? Look at it. Moisture, mold, mice, followed by squirrels and squishy floorboards. After eight years of patching, caulking and burning time I didn’t have, came the saw and the sledge. There was nothing else to do. My lesson in classic tragedy. Fixing the flaws would have destroyed the reasons I cherished the shed in the first place.

It’s also my lesson in perseverance. Next time, I’m going to do it right. I’m thinking pyramid.

The Long Walk reading

Going to see Brian Castner at Talking Leaves (Main St.) tonight at 7.  This guy is fascinating and this book is superb.

StrayScore

As a species we’ve been ranking books since there were two.  One is always better or worse than the next, but that never told the whole story, so we invented genres.  Cubby-holes into which we can shove titles, twisting, bending or ignoring the fact that a few should be in several places at one time. (An unacceptable state for any bookstore or library.  There’s no quantum Dewey decimal system.)  And that leads to StrayScore – a method for rating novels based not on quality or content, but on how far they depart from reality.

Every novel requires suspension of disbelief.  How much marks a difference that transcends genres.  There are novels based firmly in reality.  The characters act as one might expect, going about their lives on planet earth, depicted with language you can easily comprehend.  Then there are novels in which multi-phase energy clumps blink light poems in a time and place outside of time/space.  The majority of most novels fall in between.  StrayScore takes the traditional parts of a novel (theme, problem, plot, character, setting, style) and asks you to rank how far from normalcy the author has stretched.  The total of the rankings produces a final score for the book.

And for you.  While most open-minded readers are capable of appreciating anything written well, by scoring novels you hold dear, a personal preference emerges.  When it comes to the novels we love, we all have a score.  Like one of those adjustable air mattresses.  Some of us like novels with a little bit of speculation, whether it be a glimpse of a ghost, the entrenchment of a dystopian society or a murder solved and killer stashed away for life without parole.  Once you know how much disbelief you like to suspend, StrayScore can help you find novels you might love, regardless of their place on the shelves. 

StrayScore is about you and novels, and you and novels.  The more people participating, the better it works.  Please visit, sign up, vote on books listed, add books not yet vetted and tell us what you think.