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.