Bit of a problem without a car, but actually I can walk almost normally. It's just that it hurts at any angle and hurts afterwards. I try and elevate my foot at work, but that means sitting all slouchy and twisted, and I ended up with a headache yesterday and went home a bit early. I watched the recent Oliver Twist movie by Roman Polanski (which is a short version, sans Monks etc). Pretty traditional, which is OK, not everything is improved by fiddling with it. I always think I like the Oliver story, but then whenever I'm watching it I'm dreading the next bad thing that happens. The worst bit is Nancy. The Bill Sykes actor was a bit weak, he didn't have a very scary voice. The Bill in the musical is probably the best, although one of the BBC versions had a good Sykes.
Then I watched SBS. I'm trying to get into the habit of checking SBS regularly because they have very good documentaries. I keep luckily finding a series about New York City in the 20th century. It's really fascinating to look back at how people's lives were changed by economic stuff like the depression, the wars, the end of the industrial era, the car, suburbanisation, and grand "urban renewal" (turning slums into ghettos). Now we live in a world where New York is glamorous and exciting and expensive, a place where romantic comedies and sitcoms happen. It wasn't always so!** Once there were bread lines and tent cities, once there were migrant neighbourhoods, once there was a diverse manufacturing industry, once there were no cars and the streets were for people (which I love the sound of), once town hall was run by a corrupt vaudeville song writer (which I also love the sound of, but it didn't work out well).
The website has lots of little interview transcripts:
On The Grid Plan:
We would have been a very romantic city if we hadn't chosen the grid plan. When they laid out the plan in 1811 the assumption was that there would be almost no traffic up and down this little Manhattan Island -- 15 miles up and down and very narrow -- but that all the traffic would be water borne between the rivers, therefore have lots of side streets for the traffic going back and forth from river to river, and just have a handful of avenues going north and south since nobody would ever bother to use them.
On Growing Up:
One of the things that I miss the most was what it felt like in the subway between the hours of five and seven. Being on packed subway cars with working men on those cars. Guys stained with sweat, the smell of perspiration, the raw-knuckled hands, the toolboxes, heading home. Nobody would mess with guys like that. And they were very proud of the fact that they were working in the biggest city in the United States -- they were functioning people.
On Urban Renewal:
By the 60s, we knew that urban renewal was a failure, we knew that it had taken the heart and the gut out of cities. But New York's urban renewal had started in the 50s and was moving along like an unstoppable juggernaut, and there were, of course, deals made between the government and between the real estate people, the developers. I think it could have been stopped because it kept going before the Board of Estimate over and over again, and people protested, but the city felt it could not back down on the arrangements that had been made. So 15 acres were bulldozed for Brooklyn Bridge South. I think over 100 acres were bulldozed when the Washington Market was moved, and in each case what they were knocking down were streets and streets of beautiful historic buildings. Georgian and Greek-revival buildings of a style that really told us a great deal about what New York was like then, and what the changes have been.
* I've been watching this "best of Miranda" youtube thing all week, whenever I need a little giggle.
** Tim Keller has a short lecture called "the challenge of north american cities" which is interesting in a similar vein. It's an itunes podcast.
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