One day in Cleveland

These are all stories that appeared in the Plain Dealer on November 14. All items are about Ohio.

New inmate denied Xanax prescription, dies in custody
41 people charged in child porn sting
10 year old shoots and kills 11 year old sister using their 15 year old brother`s gun
85 year old man kills wife
250,000 car-related jobs endangered in Ohio
Ohio Department of Transportation contemplates closing major Cleveland bridge for two years
National City (a Cleveland bank) sold on the cheap; job losses expected
Mayor plans to balance 2009 budget
Paramedic sentenced for stealing patient credit cards
30 year old man sentenced for six rapes
Bus driver exits bus to get gas; bus careens down hill and hurts 13 kids
Hinge salesman ex-Marine pilot recalls kamikaze attack in WWII
34% increase in Ohio unemployment applications over one year; benefits shrink
Forest City Enterprises continues plan for Brooklyn Nets stadium
Kosher beef shortage caused by immigration sting in beef plants
One in 417 Ohio homes in foreclosure; this is a drop of 30% from last year
CEO of A. Schulman (a plastics company) makes $2.3 million
Cavs win six in a row
OSU women`s basketball expected to be good this year
All Things Cleveland exhibit opens in a Tremont gallery. Polka, kielbasa, sauerkraut, and the song "Bernie, Bernie" at opening; refers to the long-extinct POC beer, "Pride of Cleveland," a nickname for Pilsener Brewing Company beer, whose brewery closed in 1984
Indians logo in an obituary (in lieu of a photograph)
Names in obits: Alma, Rose, Shirley, Josephine, Mattie Pearl, Loie, Brindusa, Flora, Ginger, Virginia, Dorothy, Delphine, Maxine

On second thought

Fuck it. Squirrel picture.

Here's a squirrel dressed as Ohio's newest has-been, Joe the Plumber.




For more, including a creepy Squirrel Palin, look at Sugar Bush Squirrel. Don't say I never did nothin' for ya.

Winter

They said it would happen.

Yesterday it snowed pretty heavily, although it all mysteriously vanished by the afternoon. Last week we had days in the 70s. This week, 30s.

The sky is getting grayer and grayer. I've heard that in Cleveland you won't see the sun for five months in a row. I think that's starting.

Plus it's getting dark early.

There are still some leaves and red berries on a few trees. The squirrels here are reddish. (I think they're fox squirrels, not eastern gray squirrels.) They're digging all over the place, hiding the berries and buckeyes. So there'll still be some color--albeit rodenty--when all the leaves are gone.

I'd include pictures, but I'm kind of creeped out by rodents in general.

!!

CNN just called Ohio for Obama.

A plea

Ohio, please. Please. PLEASE. Do not fuck this one up.

The toilet lama and I both voted early. On two separate occasions, we each waited an hour and a half to vote at the board of elections. Turnout was huge even weeks ago.

Now the sun is setting, it's after five, and the nailbiting gets more extreme.

If you buckeyes are voting for McCain, I do not forgive.

PS. Did you know a buckeye is a tree? It drops a kind of false chestnut, sometimes called a horse chestnut. Horses can eat 'em but people can't.

PPS. AAAAAAAH!

Obits, redux

There were a lot of generalizations in the last post. I thought I'd get some data and include some qualitative analysis. This is from today's Plain Dealer. It skews older than it seemed to me yesterday. No kids.


Age of death / number of people
0-20s / 0
30s / 4
40s / 1
50s / 5
60s / 10
70s / 10
80s / 15
90s / 10
unlisted / 15
total / 70

unlisted age breakdown by my subjective impression:
young / 1
middle aged / 4
old / 9
?? / 1

youngest: 35
oldest: 97

number of obits with pictures: 38
of which are of white people: 22
of which are of black people: 16

Cool names: Sil, Snookie, Papa John, Cachon, Tick, Top, Tino.

Some details about people:
-wife of 61 years
-38 year old Navy vet who worked for the post office
-ex-nun with 10 grandkids
-Holocaust survivor
-literacy educator
-principal
-artist/lawyer
-veterans of World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I

The obits

Being, for better or worse, a child of my parents, I am an avid reader of the obituary section of the paper. The Irish sporting pages. Yeah, maybe it's morbid, but it's a rare opportunity to read about just people. Not in the sense of living-lives-of-righteousness (which might be the case), but in the sense of being the people you see on the bus.

Anyway. In the Plain Dealer, the obituaries very frequently include pictures. Moreso than in any paper I've ever read. It's humanizing. It's also interesting--a lot of the 95-year-olds who've died are accompanied by recent pictures of them. But just as many feature pictures of them from their youths. For women it's often wedding pictures, few of which feature smiles. They seem serious. This shit is not for joking. (More of them smile in the old-age pictures.) In their young-version pictures, the old guys often have military portraits or elaborately combed 1950s yearbook hair.

The worst part, though, is that people seem to die really young here. Today there was a picture of an infant--she didn't have enough hair to have a bow, so she had one of those ruffly elastic bands around her bald head. (Infant mortality in the US is .65% according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; in Ohio it's .73%. And, holy shit, for black non-hispanic women in Ohio, it's 1.48%. That seems insane. Imagine if one in every 75 people you know had a sibling who died as an infant.) A few days ago a three year old was in the obituaries. And before that there were others.

In Cleveland, apparently it's not rare to die around age 50. Even more alarmingly, a not insignificant number die in their teens, twenties, or thirties. Teenagers. Seriously. The paper rarely lists a cause of death, so it seems like an inexplicable pandemic is spreading. What makes these people die? Crystal meth? Gunshots? Car crashes? The whole thing makes me want to shop at that Mexico City store where all the clothes are bulletproof.

Miguel Caballero it is.

PS--Highly worthwhile to poke around that web page.

Help.

A letter to the editor in the Plain Dealer on Friday:

Is this Cleveland or Sodom?

Is Cleveland so hard up for money that we need to push aside our morals and integrity and vie to host the 2014 Gay Games (Plain Dealer, Oct. 16)? Are we condoning homosexuality by courting this event? It's bad enough that gay marriages are being legalized.

I'm sure that I am going to upset a lot of people, but I'm sorry. I'm no Bible thumper, but please tell me where in the Bible it says that men are to be with men and women are to be with women? If there is such a passage in the Bible, then I will gladly shut up.

-Juanita Solis, Cleveland


Interestingly enough, on the Plain Dealer website, the letter is called "Cleveland should let Gay Games go elsewhere."

On the upside, the Plain Dealer endorsed Obama.

The cool rust belt city

Traitorous as this would be considered by Forest City residents, I'm starting to fetishize Pittsburgh.

I know. WTF. Isn't that the city once dubbed "hell with the lid off"?

But George Romero is from there, and that creepy Romero vampire movie Martin was about Pittsburgh. (Watch that if you haven't--it's crazy as a bedbug and intensely creepy.) In Night of the Living Dead, Johnny and Barbie are from Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh has romantic crumbling bridges and the Incline, which is an angled scenic rail car. It's rusting, but in a cool way. (As for uncool rust: a major bridge in Cleveland is partially shut down because of incipient collapse now. God knows how they'll pay to repair it.)

Pittsburgh has an iconic hot dog establishment called the Dirty O.

The Whiskey Rebellion even took place round about Pittsburgh. George Washington busted in to kick ass in person.

Their version of you-plural is yins. No shit.

Pittsburgh is just cool. Run down, smallish, but with character. Anyway, "hell with the lid off" sounds badass. Compare that to "the mistake on the lake."

This could be interpreted as some pretty weak escapism. The population's dropping even faster there.

Even less about Cleveland

I know, I know, the blog is supposed to be about Cleveland. I know I've been shamefully neglecting our nation's 40th largest city (in 2007). (BTW--I'm not alone in this neglect. Cleveland was the 33rd largest US city on the 2000 census. Its population has dropped 8.4% in those seven years. Ouch.)

Sorry, but I've been out of town a lot.

Last weekend I harvested a bumper crop of apples in New Jersey and saw my much-missed friends in New York.

This weekend I'll be in New Mexico.

Up next: New Hampshire? It would round out the news.

PS--The Plain Dealer included a recipe today for croissants in a can with chocolate chips slapped in the middle. Wrote it out as a recipe and everything.

Devobama!

Hey, spuds, Devo's getting out the vote in Akron. Alas. I'll be out of town for the show. Otherwise I could be kicking it with Mark Mothersbaugh.



This is disturbingly ingenuous for Devo.

Ticket info.

New York Times on Cleveland

Summary: Cleveland's a crumbling disaster. They had to get a guy from Pittsburgh to try to dismantle houses in some "green" way that seems to be a flop. Clevelanders are desperate for work. The expansion industry in Cleveland involves razing the city.

Times link

From the article:

The house at 6538 Lederer was built in 1900 on a quiet back street in the Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland. By the ’50s, Slavic Village, named for the immigrants who came to work in its steel mills, had grown to 70,000 residents; Cleveland was billed as “the greatest location in the nation.” Then, gradually, machines replaced men at the mills, and the laborers left.

Recently, Slavic Village has been a perpetual media symbol for the subprime mortgage fiasco, akin to what the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans became after Katrina. According to its city councilman, Tony Brancatelli, 1 of every 11 homes in the neighborhood is now empty. Many are bought and sold on eBay for as little as $5,000. Arson has been a problem, and in the two years since 6538 was boarded up, looters tore out its copper wiring and peeled off its aluminum siding as high as they could reach. A dead cat awaited Guy in an upstairs bedroom.

There are now 8,000 vacants in Cleveland. The city, ramping up condemnations, will spend $9 million demolishing 1,100 of them by the end of the year. It plans to continue at this clip indefinitely. The Cleveland Foundation, a well-endowed nonprofit, approached Guy to run a pilot study assessing the feasibility of deconstructing, or even partly deconstructing, some of those structures instead. What would end up being preserved, and what might be created in the process?

...

And yet in Cleveland the drawback of deconstruction that Guy was always trying to compensate for — that it takes two weeks and a dozen wage earners to do what a piece of hydraulic machinery accomplishes before lunch — was actually a selling point. The Cleveland Foundation was attracted to deconstruction as a way to provide jobs and job training in a county where unemployment is high and 5,000 ex-offenders surge out of prison every year. As a concept, at least, it fit nicely into the city’s effort to become a cradle for sustainable industries and green-collar jobs.

The city contributed $19,000 to Guy’s pilot project, the cost of demolishing the two condemned houses he would now deconstruct. The Cleveland Foundation agreed to cover the ultimate difference in cost. As the project got under way, the city, the foundation and its nonprofit partners were all committed to taking a close look at the results and exploring what subsidies or incentives might be put in place to stimulate a new, local industry. No one seemed to have any concrete ideas of how exactly they might go forward. But they floored Guy with their enthusiasm. He had never experienced such openness outside of famously green cities like Portland or San Francisco.

...

Among them was Robert Middlebrooks, a widower living in a foreclosed home next door. (A judge, he said, ordered him to stay when the mortgage company didn’t show up in court.) Last fall, Middlebrooks’s son, a truck driver, was shot and killed across the street. A few months later, Middlebrooks had two toes amputated after a fall. He had taken to standing at the curb in front of 6538 most mornings, holding a pair of black work gloves just in case Guy was hiring.

Netflix local favorites for Cleveland, OH

Purple Rain (NEEDS NO INTRODUCTION, WORSHIP WORSHIP)

Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone and Jewish mobsters in Brooklyn!)

Once Upon a Time in China II (Jet Li kicks all ass, part II.)

Brian's Song (Billy Dee Williams and James Caan in a George Hallas/Chicago Bears interracial buddy film.)

Civic Duty (Accountant obsessionally watches TV and wants to kill his Muslim neighbor!)


Conclusion:

!!!!!! THERE IS HOPE, MOTHERFUCKERS !!!!!!!

I gotta get out and kick it with this citizenry.

Thus Spake Toilet Lama

Who has two thumbs and knows what evil lurks at the bottom of the bowl?  This guy.  Did you know "Dalai" means "ocean"?  As in the teacher with knowledge as deep as the ocean.  You get the picture vis-a-vis the toilet.

The line of Dalai Lamas is protected by Palden Lhamo,  "The Victorious One who Turns Back Enemies".  She hangs out by a lake, albeit a flaming pool of blood.  Turn-ons include mule rides and drinking blood from the skull of an expired activity partner.  Some lamas get all the luck when it comes to protectoresses.  The line of Toilet Lamas is protected by a similar character, Paladin Lame-0, "The One who Breaks Even at Best".   Similar deal.  Swap out the flaming lake of blood for a flaming river of sewage, slap a Browns helmet on there, and you end up with defensive tackle Shaun "Big Baby" Rogers riding a pony with his shirt off, still imbued with the amazing power to let the Browns go 0-2.

Thus protected, the current Toilet Lama is on a brown adventure in a brown land.  Van Halen never had it so brown.  Never fear, gentle reader.  Every doody will sparkle if you eat diamonds for breakfast.

Tribe

So the Indians and their fans are referred to as the Tribe. They were out in somewhat skimpy numbers yesterday at Progressive Field. (Friggin' corporate named fields. How am I supposed to differentiate between Quicken Loans Field, Invesco Field, Progressive Field, Conhugeco Stadium, and Blovent Infocorpse Arena? They all might as well be stadia for the Everywhereandnowhere Conglomerates.)

Anyway, the Indians ended up with a somewhat unjustified win. It wasn't quite a Cubs-level mess--after all, they won--but it was still a mess. The Indians were up 8-1 against the Twins. In the ninth, it was tied 9-9. Oops. In the 13th inning our loveable racist caricatures pulled out the victory.

Still, peanuts, a beer, and a ballgame. It's hard to object when you're being poked by a trident of all-American bliss.

The stadium is really cool--there are open sightlines even from behind the stands. I saw a biker gang there en masse, as well as a frail looking grandma in head-to-toe Indians wear clutching her score sheet. A couple of times, there was an on-field comical race between a red hot dog and a yellow and white one. White hot dog? I mean, maybe an uncooked veal brat, I guess. Then somebody said it was a competition between ketchup, mustard, and onions. Mustard won. This of course is only right.

Although they charge you $6.75 for a Bud Lite (BOO!), a Great Lakes Dortmunder Gold is 50 cents more. Worth the price upgrade I'd say. You can get a good local beer at the stadium, which is nice.

I was in the bleachers. They even have backs on the bleachers! Luxury even in the cheap seats. And they were cheap: $5 a head, AND it was $1 hot dog night. Plus you could buy day-of-game tickets, which I consider to be a big plus.

Last night was also the first time I've felt chilly in a while. Damn it all, I don't want summer to end.

aRABica vs. araBICa

The best kind of coffee bean is arabica. (The less-good filler one is called robusta.) It is pronounced aRABica. SRSLY, I quote the internet.

In Cleveland, a chainlet of coffee shops is called Arabica. Make that araBEEKa.

???????????????????

Also, I'm going to an Indians game tonight.

Grocery store hijinks

My first trip to the grocery store in Cleveland involved some googling. I clearly don't know shit about this town, but I needed milk. It seems that there aren't too many options for grocery stores. There's a Whole Foods, which I didn't want to go to, and a Trader Joe's kind of far away. The standard issue grocery stores are Dave's Market and Giant Eagle (or Giant Iggle, to Pittsburghers--no kidding).

So I got directions to the Giant Eagle nearby. Every single customer except me was black.

The next time I went to the store, I tried the Dave's Market, about the same distance from my house as the Giant Eagle. The customers were white.

There is some very weird shit going on in this town.

For the record, my car was probably the beater-iest car in either parking lot.

Food bitching

Not "the food is bitchin.'"

I did get a decent bagel at Bialy's. An ex-New Yorker guy I met informed me that, no, I didn't get "a" bagel. I got the only bagel in Cleveland. The rest are the dreaded bread ring.

Today I paid $6 for a bottle of Sriracha. I was delighted to be able to do so. The store SOLD Sriracha. This is most certainly not a given.

I found some tortillas. Alas. They were mass-market corn tortillas that turned out to have wheat in them. And a whole bunch of other weird shit. Manny, the tortilla conglomerate guy, has gone to the dark side.

There are no local apples that I have seen, despite an article in the Plain Dealer reporting an epic apple harvest this year. Ok, I'm still figuring it out and all, but damn. Sell me an apple from Ohio! I'll buy it!

And speaking of the Plain Dealer. It is really a good paper. Solid international coverage, a lot of local news, and much, much more actual content than, say, the Chicago Tribune. It even has comics! Did you know that "Mary Worth" is still being published? No "Phantom" though. And it has a gigantic classified section every day.

But. But. There is a food section called "Taste." It is full of food abominations.

They include a story about and recipe from a woman who makes a vast amount of tomato sauce in her garage. The article includes a long disclaimer about how this recipe JUST MIGHT give you botulism. According to the government or some other such clowns.

Got a lot of zucchini on your plants this year? (You have a huge back yard. Duh. What do you think your $800 a month is paying for? Just that three bedroom house?) "Coat slices with a paste of garlic, olive oil, and ketchup, then grill and chop. Toss with cooked pasta tossed with a little oil, then dress for a room-temperature salad with feta cheese, kalamata olives, parsley, and a simple vinaigrette." Ketchup. On zucchini. With pasta. Ketchup with olives. Ketchup with feta. Ketchup?

Perhaps the most indicative of the tenor, though, is a recipe I read. I quote.

Homemade Skillet Meal Seasoning Mix

2 cups powdered milk
1/2 cup dehydrated onion
3 tablespoons beef or chicken bouillon granules
2 tablespoons garlic powder
2 tablespoons onion powder
2 tablespoons dried parsley
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground black pepper

Add that shit to a pound of ground beef and some egg noodles. Maybe some canned mushrooms! Eat up, Cleveland!

It's my theory that they spell out the measurements because if you gave a rat's ass about your mouth--and therefore knew the abbreviation for tablespoon--you wouldn't be making this.

Then I looked in the Plain Dealer archives. They have an article about how mustard is good on hot dogs.

Help!

Neck beards and a Toilet Lama

There's a new poster to the site: the Toilet Lama. He's taking his name from a Cleveland poet/wild man, D. A. Levy. Like me, the Toilet Lama is figuring out what the hell's going on in the Forest City. I'm looking forward to lots of toiletty insights.

And, for your edification, proof that the Chicago Tribune is a mockery.

9-5

I had my first day of work today. Phew. I feel beaten. But I think it went pretty well. It's funny to feel so on the spot. And yet at the same time I'm the boss and they're on the spot.

I wish there was something more erudite, more profound, hell, even plain old coherent I could say. But I'm wiped. Slump.

Bagel quest!

It's a Sunday. What more could a person want than a bagel? (This also applies to other days of the week.)

I've been hunting around for the word about bagels. Here's what I've come up with.

Bialy's (as mentioned before):
Recommended by an ex-New Yorker, a law partner named Barbara.
Reviews
Map

Unger's:
Recommended by a historian of Eastern European Jewry.
Map
An apparently unrelated but cool Cleveland Unger

A place to poke about: Frum Cleveland. Maybe that'll turn up some pickles.

Friends & a Fudgie

I have some kick-ass friends.

Plus today I was inadvertently reminded of how in college I went to a 99 cent store with a certain other party and bought frizzy weave hair in big bunches. We wore them around campus in only the finest of styles.

Also I have some leads on bagels in this town. Apparently there is an orthodox neighborhood and two recommended shops. One is called Bialy's. That's promising.

And I have a Fudgie! Fudgie the whale is the best whale ever.

Go Ohio Carvel! Much moreso, go awesome pals.

Observed around town

-By the side of a highway, I spotted a sign that advertised the Brooklyn Tractor Company. Eek! So absurdly wrong.

-An anti-abortion billboard that said "womb with a view." Set aside the fact that that is a heinous pun about a uterus. You can rest assured that the authors of said pun have never read E.M. Forster. To boil it down, "A Room with a View" is a story about how a girl goes on vacation and chucks propriety aside to get in the pants of a hot lower class dude. Someone named Honeychurch elopes to Florence to hump the wrong guy. Oops, anti-abortionists. Better work on that literacy.

-I saw someone attempting to parallel park. This person clearly had never done so before. This person was dropping her kid off at college. Jaysus.

On the good side:

-I heard "Passing Complexion" by Big Black on the radio.

Clevelanding

I drove the moving truck into Cleveland this morning after midnight.

At best, the giant truck seemed unnavigable. I lurched down the highway, attempting not to sideswipe anybody (with success, although I did scrape the back tire rim on a toll booth. Classy.) In Cleveland, the streets got unruly too. They started to be either potholed or torn up to fix potholes.

I drove through some pretty profound ghetto the likes of which I haven't seen too many times. (For reference: outside my high school I saw tires on fire in the street. I regularly saw crack vials.) There were abundant boarded-up and decaying houses and storefront churches and check cashing places. There were bars surrounded by late-night smokers forced outside by a smoking ban. All the bar patrons were black. Sometimes the houses gave way to nothing. Just empty lots with tall grass. In Chicago this kind of empty lot used to be called a prairie, but now they've been pretty well gentrified out of existence. Not so in Cleveland. The city also seems to be as profoundly segregated as Chicago. Maybe moreso. That's really saying something.

All of a sudden, the torn up streets and burned-out houses gave way to spectacular parks, museums, monuments to wealth and its culture. That was the destination.

Dropping off the truck today, I drove an easy walking distance away from the new apartment. On one block, grand brick houses. The next, a yuppie-ish condo building renovated from a turn-of-the-century building. On that same block, though, boarded up buildings and the ruins of a corner store with hand-painted ads for popsicles and beer. You could see the sunlight straight through the drooping ceiling and broken glass windows.

The guy at the truck drop-off ran a tire repair shop. On the phone I heard him say his name was Jay. He was wearing a wife beater and a do-rag and his front tooth was missing. He was sucking down menthols. He also voiced his disgust with the inventory practices of the trucking company and made several phone calls in which he instructed the truck company people how to navigate their software. He seemed irritated that he had to be dealing with that instead of fixing some tires. He also yelled about how Herbert, his apparent coworker, had moved the boxes of oil. A toothless old dude called Pop came in and out.

Outside, a woman was playing a real piano and singing hymns on the street corner. A congregation of two young girls attended.

This town is going to be pretty fascinating, I'm guessing.

A meta note: I intend to post a lot of photos here, but I'm surrounded by an outlandish number of boxes and I have to find my camera. I'm also a little shy about taking pictures of people and of being a white social tourist. So what, though? Blog photos will be starting up soon.

Chagrin Boulevard

It's a complex emotion and it's a major thoroughfare in Cleveland. Chagrin.

This blog will document the city of Cleveland. It's written by someone new to the city. Rust belt, here I come.