Jean-Claude Vannier and his orchestra working with Yves Saint-Laurent in the early 70s.

In June 2009, Marc Kremers stumbled across the personals section of Haitianconnection.com and collected several hundred of the brazen images he found there. After the devastion that the earthquake on 12th January 2010 has caused, and the subsequent media coverage of their plight, we at As-found think it’s pertinent to show Haitians according to their own self-image and means. Thanks to Damien Poulain for the title illustration and Julie Rubio for the exhibition title.

Slavs and Tatars & Ooga Booga present the west coast debut of Kidnapping Mountains. Featuring a selection and sale of Slavs and Tatars posters, editions, and printed matter.

Ooga Booga
943 N Broadway #203
Los Angeles CA 90012
14 January — 7 February 2010

Ooga Booga is a concept shop vital to the creative life-blood of Los Angeles. It gathers an eclectic range of products. Spearheaded by Wendy Yao, Ooga Booga fosters a vibrant community of independent producers. For Swiss Institute, Yao installs a lounge in which one may read over 300 titles — from self to professionally published. The room contains contributions by:

Not Equal, 2009, Plywood, wood glue and enamel paint, 13.1 x 17.75 inches

Shannon Ebner
Invisible Language Workshop
30 October — 19 December 2009
Opening Reception: Friday 30 October, 6-8pm
Wallspace

Music Video for my brother’s band, Escort, All Through the Night, edited and synched to various Muppets shows by Irvin Coffee, 2007. Miss you Darius!

Altadena Works is a creative partnership based in California that emerged from our shared desire to produce quality goods manufactured within the USA. Our products are rooted in simple and straightforward design, constructed meticulously with functionality and longevity in mind. Understated yet luxurious in their material quality, our bags deliver a solution both modern and practical for everyday use.

Another Border:
A Selection of Films and Videos from the Cinémathèque de Tanger Archives
@ LACMA

Tuesdays: June 9, 16, 23 & 30 | 7 pm | Bing Theater
Tickets required: $7 general admission, $5 museum members,

TONIGHT, June 9

PROGRAM 1: (HI)STORY Tellers
 
An American in Tangier
Dir. Mohamed Ulad | 1993 | 27 min
The American writer and composer, Paul Bowles, reflects on his life in Morocco, his adopted home for over fifty years.
 
Vues du Grand Socco at du Petit Socco (View of the Main Square and the Small Square)
Dir. Gabriel Veyre | 1935 | 7 min
Photographer and filmmaker Gabriel Veyre was 25 years old when engaged by the Lumière brothers as a cinematograph operator. In 1901 he became the photographer and cinematographer to the Sultan of Morocco, and in 1935 he traveled around the country to build an archive of daily life in Morocco.

Intermission

Ouarzazate Movie (The Door of the Desert)
Dir. Ali Essafi | 2001 | 57 min
The people of Ourzazate, a small Moroccan town, make a living from international cinema productions. The whole population works as extras in films they will most likely never see. In the cloakrooms and casting sets, Essafi follows the people of the town in both their humiliations and Hollywood dreams.
 
This program will be accompanied by a special introduction by Bidoun Magazine (www.bidoun.com) and a reading by author Gary Dauphin. During the intermission attendees are invited to a reception sponsored by Bidoun Magazine.

The Cinémathèque de Tanger (www.cinemathequedetanger.com) is a nonprofit organization based in Tangiers, Morocco devoted to the preservation and promotion of Moroccan cinema. Curated by Bouchra Khalili and Yto Barrada, Another Border showcases the vitality of contemporary Moroccan film and video alongside the richness of historic archival footage from the region. This selection of Moroccan short movies, documentaries, experimental films, and videos follows the fault lines between representation and reality, in both daily life and extraordinary circumstances. The intersection between tradition, globalization, and shifting notions of ‘modernity’ creates not a clash, but a fertile space for reflection. Addressing both the complex space between the West and Morocco, the program provides a platform for further dialogue on the ideas of hope and hospitality.

Union Football League Playoff Semi Finals this Sunday, June 7th.
Schedule and Map and on league website:

by Elisabeth Rosenthal

Vauban, Germany — Residents of this upscale community are suburban pioneers, going where few soccer moms or commuting executives have ever gone before: they have given up their cars.

Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the Swiss border. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community. Car ownership is allowed, but there are only two places to park — large garages at the edge of the development, where a car-owner buys a space, for $40,000, along with a home.

As a result, 70 percent of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57 percent sold a car to move here. “When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor.

Vauban, completed in 2006, is an example of a growing trend in Europe, the United States and elsewhere to separate suburban life from auto use, a movement called “smart planning.”

Automobiles are the linchpin of suburbs, where middle-class families from Chicago to Shanghai tend to make their homes. And that, experts say, is a huge impediment to current efforts to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes to reduce global warming. Passenger cars are responsible for 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe, a proportion that is growing, according to the European Environment Agency, and up to 50 percent in some car intensive areas in the United States.

While there have been efforts in the past two decades to make cities more dense and better for walking, planners are now taking the concept to the suburbs and focusing specifically on environmental benefits like reducing emissions. Vauban, completed in 2006 and home to 5,500 residents within a rectangular square mile, may be the most advanced experiment in low-car suburban life. But its basic precepts are being adopted around the world in attempts to make suburbs more compact and more accessible to public transportation, with fewer parking spaces. In this new approach, stores are placed a walk away, on a main street, rather than in malls along some distant highway.

“All of our development since World War II has been centered on the car, and that will have to change,” said David Goldberg, an official at Transportation for America, a fast-growing coalition of hundreds of groups in the United States — including environmental groups, mayors’ offices and the American Association of Retired People — who are promoting new communities that are less dependent on cars. Mr. Goldberg added: “How much you drive is as important as whether you have a hybrid,” he said.

Levittown and Scarsdale, New York suburbs with spread-out homes and private garages, were the dream towns of the 1950s and still exert a strong appeal. But some new suburbs may well look more Vauban-like, not only in developed countries but also in the developing world, where emissions from an increasing number of private cars owned by the burgeoning middle class are choking cities.

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency is promoting “car reduced” communities, and legislators are starting to act, if cautiously. Many experts expect public transport serving suburbs to play a much larger role in a new six-year federal transportation bill to be approved this year, Mr. Goldberg said. In previous bills, 80 percent of appropriations have by law gone to highways and only 20 percent to other transport.

In California, the Hayward Area Planning Association is developing a Vauban-like community called Quarry Village on the outskirts of Oakland, accessible without a car to the Bay Area Rapid Transit system and to the California State University’s campus in Hayward.

Sherman Lewis, a professor emeritus at Cal State and a leader of the association, says he “can’t wait to move in” and hopes that Quarry Village will allow his family to reduce its car ownership from two to one, and potentially to zero if Quarry Village’s car-sharing club takes off. But the current system is still stacked against the project, he said, noting that mortgage lenders worry about resale value of half-million-dollar homes that have no place for cars, and most zoning laws in the United States still require requiring two parking spaces per residential unit. Quarry Village has obtained an exception from Hayward.

And convincing people to give up their cars is often an uphill run. “People in the U.S. are incredibly suspicious of any idea where people are not going to own cars, or are going to own fewer,” said David Ceaser, co-founder of CarFree City USA, who said no car-free suburban project the size of Vauban had been successful in the United States.

In Europe — which planners agree is further along than America — some governments are thinking on national scale. From 2000 to 2005, Great Britain undertook a comprehensive effort to reform national planning, which was intended to discourage car use by requiring that new development be accessible by public transit.

“Development comprising jobs, shopping, leisure and services should not be designed and located on the assumption that the car will represent the only realistic means of access for the vast majority of people,” said PPG 13, the British government’s revolutionary 2001 planning document. Dozens of shopping malls, fast-food restaurants and housing compounds have been refused planning permits based on the new regulations.

“You’re basically not allowed to build shopping malls in the middle of nowhere anymore,” said Roger L. Mackett, a professor at the Center for Transport Studies, University College, London. While British planning regulations once stipulated the minimum number of parking spaces in new residential compounds, now there is a maximum allowed. That creates big changes.

Life in a car-reduced place like Vauban has it own unusual gestalt in the country that is home to Mercedes-Benz and the autobahn. It is long and relatively narrow, so that the tram into Freiburg is an easy walk from every home. Stores, restaurants, banks and schools are more interspersed among homes than they are in a typical suburb. Most residents, like Ms. Walter, have carts they haul behind bicycles for shopping trips or children’s play dates.

For trips to stores like IKEA or ski slopes, families buy cars together or use communal cars rented out by Vauban’s car-sharing club. Ms. Walter had previously lived — with a private car — in Freiburg as well as the United States.

“If you have one, you tend to use it,” she said. “Some people move in here and move out rather quickly — they miss the car next door.”

But Vauban was in some ways an ideal laboratory for testing the idea of reducing car use. The site of a former Nazi army base, it was occupied by the French Army from the end of World War II until the reunification of Germany in 1989. Because it was planned as a base, the grid was never meant to accommodate private car use: the “roads” were narrow passageways between barracks.

Original buildings have long since been torn town, and the stylish row houses that replaced them are set amid lush yards but are shaped somewhat like barracks — buildings of four or five stories designed to reduce heat loss and maximize energy efficiency. They are trimmed with exotic woods and have elaborate balconies, lush gardens and metal sculptures, as befits a contemporary high-end suburb. By nature, people who buy in Vauban are inclined to be green guinea pigs — indeed, more than half vote for the German Green Party. Still, many say it is the quality of life in a car-free community that feels like a Club Med for everyday living that keeps them here.

Henk Schulz, a scientist who on one afternoon last month was watching his three young children wander around Vauban, remembers the day he turned 18. “You were so excited about buying your first car,” he said. Now, Mr. Schulz added, he is glad to be raising his children away from cars; he does not worry much about their safety in the street.

In the past few years, Vauban has become a well-known niche community, even if it has spawned few imitators in Germany. But whether the concept will work in California is an open question. More than 100 would-be owners have signed up to buy in the Bay Area’s “car-reduced” Quarry Village, and Mr. Lewis is still looking for about $2 million in seed financing to get the project off the ground.

But if it doesn’t work, his backup proposal is to build a development on the same plot that permits unfettered car use. It is called Village D’Italia.

Inside Motto Berlin, Skalitzerstrasse 68, Im Hinterhof.

“We are proud to announce the European launch of Fillip 9 in partnership with Konst-ig, Stockholm, and Motto Berlin. As part of these transcontinental events, Fillip staff and board members will discuss recent writing and artist projects that situate the publication within the larger landscape of international art criticism. This will also be an opportunity to expand discussions begun during our recent Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism series presented this past February in collaboration with Artspeak, Vancouver.”

All are invited to attend and participate in these discussions:

About the current issue
In Fillip 9, Diedrich Diedrichsen provides an in depth discussion of Paul Valéry and pop music, and critic Shepherd Steiner considers the Martha Rosler Library project through the lens of the Boolean search. The issue also features conversations between Lea Feinstein and Christian L. Frock on second wave feminism and last year’s proliferation of feminist art shows, and between Boris Groys and Andro Wekua on art practice and production today and in the former East Europe. In addition, Fillip 9 includes an interview with Steve Lambert of the New York Times Special Edition project among exhibition reviews and other texts.

We are very pleased to present a special audio project for the issue, a yellow vinyl 45 by artists Cranfield and Slade, which is included in each copy of the magazine. The edition is produced in collaboration with the Or Gallery, Vancouver, and in support of the artists’ forthcoming album 12 Sun Songs by the Or Gallery, Christoph Keller Editions, and JRP/Ringier.

by Martin Fackler

HIME ISLAND, Japan — If Marxism had ever produced a functional, prosperous society, it might have looked something like this tiny southern Japanese island.

At first glance, there is little to set Hime (pronounced HEE-may) apart from the hundreds of other small inhabited islands that dot the coasts of Japan’s main isles. The 2,519 mostly graying islanders subsist on fishing and shrimp farming, and every summer hold a Shinto religious festival featuring dancers dressed as foxes.

But once off the ferry, the island’s sole public transportation link to the outside, visitors are greeted by an unusual sight: a tall, bronze statue of Hime’s previous mayor, rare in a country that typically shuns such political aggrandizement. Rarer still is that the statue was erected by his son, who is the island’s current mayor.

In fact, the father, who died in 1984, and the son, who succeeded him, have won every mayoral election in Himeshima, the island’s village, for 49 years — without once being challenged by a rival candidate.

And it is not just the cult-of-personality politics that smack of a latter-day workers’ paradise. This sleepy island, just off Japan’s main southern island, Kyushu, has recently come under unaccustomed national media attention for a very different reason: it invented its own version of work-sharing four decades before the current economic crisis popularized the term.

Under Hime’s system, village employees earn about a third less pay than public servants elsewhere in Japan, though they work the same hours. This has allowed the village to create more jobs: it now directly or indirectly employs a fifth of all working islanders. Most of the rest are engaged in fishing, also government-subsidized. In fact, village officials say, there are few fully private-sector jobs on the island.

Islanders admit to the socialist parallels, even while proclaiming themselves political conservatives who vote for the governing right-wing Liberal Democratic Party. Some jokingly take the analogy a step further, comparing themselves to a much more repressive family-run regime in Japan’s geopolitical neighborhood.

“Hime Island is North Korea, just a livable version,” Naokazu Koiwa said with a laugh. Mr. Koiwa, 32, repairs fishing boats.

Unsurprisingly, the current mayor, Akio Fujimoto, flatly rejects the North Korean comparison. Rather, he and most other islanders call Hime a repository for traditional Japanese values, like economic egalitarianism and social harmony. They say the rest of the nation has lost these in an embrace of more competitive capitalism, especially under the prime ministership of Junichiro Koizumi from 2001-6.

“Our thinking is, ‘let’s all share the economic pie and get along, instead of giving all of it to the rich,’ ” said Mr. Fujimoto, whose father, Kumao Fujimoto, devised the work-sharing system in the 1960s. “Avoiding competition is the traditional Japanese way.”

Now, with the current crisis causing a national questioning of American-style laissez-faire economics, and business leaders and unions seeking alternatives to widespread job cuts, Hime’s work-sharing scheme is suddenly being held up as a new model. Islanders call it ironic that the current crisis has made traditional values appear progressive, even utopian.

Nor does the island’s penchant for equality stop at work-sharing. At an annual village ceremony to mark the coming of age of 20-year-old islanders, women are forbidden to wear traditional kimonos for fear the differences in quality could reveal their households’ economic status.

Dismayed by the inconsistent television reception across this mountainous island about half the size of Key West, the current mayor installed a free cable TV system that now reaches 97 percent of homes.

Even by clannish Japan’s standards, the island seems a friendly, close-knit place. Islanders cheerfully greet passing strangers. Roads, parks and even public toilets are immaculate. Doors are left unlocked, and the island has only one policeman.

Mr. Fujimoto also cites traditional attitudes to explain his own political longevity, a claim most islanders seem to accept. He says islanders shun public elections because of a deep-rooted abhorrence of confrontation. He said the last time the village held a mayoral election, in 1955, it split the island, creating ill feelings that took a generation to heal.

To avoid a repeat of such trauma, he said, the island decided to choose mayors by consensus, finding someone on whom everyone could agree beforehand. Last year, Mr. Fujimoto won his seventh straight four-year term, once again by default in an uncontested election.

“My job is to prevent elections by keeping everyone equal, and thus happy,” said Mr. Fujimoto, 65, sitting in a modest office in the village hall. His only visible sign of authority was a buzzer on his desk that he pushed to summon an assistant.

Mr. Fujimoto said he would resign immediately if a serious rival appeared in an election. “That would be a sign the village has lost confidence in me,” he said.

Many islanders say Mr. Fujimoto is able to stay in office partly because of the reverence still felt here for his father, who lifted Hime from postwar poverty by turning it into a loyal source of votes for the Liberal Democratic Party, which rewarded the island with generous public works.

“We have our own little personality cult,” said Shokai Dozono, a Buddhist monk who runs one of the island’s two temples.

The island and its mayor also have outside critics. Keizo Nagai, the ombudsman for Oita prefecture, which includes Hime, calls the island the least transparent local government in the prefecture. He criticized it for refusing to make information like detailed budget records available to non-islanders, which he attributed to a closed local culture rather than to a cover-up of wrongdoing.

“Hime Island acts like an independent kingdom,” Mr. Nagai said.

Many islanders say they accept the status quo simply because life here is comfortable. They say rocking the boat would only ostracize them on an island where everyone knows one another.

“Everyone is basically satisfied,” said Shusaku Akaishi, 29, who works at his family’s gas station. “This is a conservative place.”

That conservatism is strong enough at times to annoy even Mr. Fujimoto. His biggest complaint is that traditional attitudes prevent him from extending family control of the mayor’s office for another generation, because he has only a daughter.

“Hime Island can’t be run by a woman,” he sighed. “This place is too medieval for that.”

via South Willard

via Arduous Glamour

by Randy Kennedy

Irving, Texas — Just after sunrise one morning last summer, as his two sons hurried out the door to school, Oscar Urbina might have presented a portrait of domestic stability in this Dallas suburb, a 35-year-old man with a nice home, a thriving family and a steady contracting job.

But a few weeks earlier, after buying a Dodge Ram truck at a local dealership, he had been summoned back to deal with some paperwork problems. And shortly after he arrived, so did the police, who arrested him on charges of using a false Social Security number.

Mr. Urbina does not deny it; he has been living illegally in the Dallas area since coming to the country from Mexico in 1993. But the turn of events stunned him in a once-welcoming place where people had never paid much attention to Social Security numbers.

If the arrest had come earlier, it might have had little effect on his life. But two years ago, Irving made a decision, championed by its first-term mayor, Herbert A. Gears, to conduct immigration checks on everyone booked into the local jail. So Mr. Urbina was automatically referred to the federal authorities and now faces possible deportation, becoming one of more than 4,000 illegal immigrants here who have ended up in similar circumstances.

As battles over illegal immigration rage around the country, Irving’s crackdown is not unusual in itself. What makes it striking is that it happened with the blessing of a mayor like Mr. Gears, an immigrant-friendly Democrat with deep political ties to the city’s Hispanic leaders, a man who likes to preach that adapting to immigration — especially in a city like his, now almost half-Hispanic — is not a burden but an opportunity, or as he says, it’s “not a have-to, it’s a get-to.”

But as a wave of sentiment against illegal immigration built around Dallas and the nation, Mr. Gears came to realize that his city would be unable to remain on the sidelines — and that his own political future would depend on how he navigated newly treacherous terrain.

Irving is one of a growing number of cities across America where immigration control, a federal prerogative, is reshaping politics at the other end of the spectrum, the local level, in the absence of a national policy overhaul. To watch its experiment play out over the better part of the past year in City Hall and in its residents’ lives is to see how difficult political moderation has become in the debate over what to do with the country’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

Irving’s jail program was started by the city’s police chief as an experiment with federal immigration officials. But Mr. Gears saw in it a kind of release valve for the political pressure building around him, which had been energized by much more aggressive measures to force out illegal immigrants in Farmers Branch, a smaller suburb next door.

“I let my instincts rule the moment in that instance,” he said. “What weighed heavily in my thoughts is that if we didn’t do something, a lot more immigrants were going to be hurt.”

“And now,” Mr. Gears added ruefully, “I’m the hero of every redneck in America.”

Nationally, most of the attention in the immigration fight has centered on smaller cities that have taken a hard line on illegal immigration, like Farmers Branch and Hazleton, Pa., or on cities that have moved to protect illegal immigrants, like San Francisco and New Haven.

Irving is one of the places with a growing percentage of illegal immigrants that has tried to take — Mr. Gears’s critics say has stumbled upon — a much less explored middle road.

As a first-ring suburb whose non-Hispanic white population has slipped from the majority in the last few years, Irving describes itself as a multicultural community. Under Mr. Gears, it recently opened a hospital clinic that caters to low-income patients, many of them Hispanic, and gave $100,000 to support its fledgling Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

But even as it was doing so, its policy on immigration checks prompted the Mexican consul in Dallas to issue an unusual warning to Mexican immigrants to stay clear of Irving. And businesses both Hispanic-owned and not, including Wal-Mart, began howling to the mayor that fear was driving away Hispanic customers.

Mr. Gears, 46, is a big, gregarious, politically agile Texan who won re-election last May against an opponent whose campaign promised much tougher immigration measures. The mayor describes the rise of such sentiment around him as disturbing, a manifestation of “domestic extremism,” and he derides its adherents as “the crankies.”

“We defeated the crankies, and no one thought we could,” Mr. Gears said of his re-election. “We’ve defined what our responsibility is, and that’s only to allow the federal government to do its job. It’s not our responsibility to evaluate it or assess whether it’s good or not.”

Mr. Gears happened to be making these points in a booth at his favorite local bar, where he was being served by his favorite waitress, a friendly mother of five — in the country illegally — whom he has known for years and tips lavishly to help her make ends meet.

He acknowledges that Irving’s policy, whose chief goal is to get rid of dangerous criminals who are in the country illegally, has resulted in “casualties,” with many people deported as a result of lesser, nonviolent offenses like driving without a license or insurance.

The police chief, Larry Boyd, said he believed that the city’s enviable crime rate (last year was its lowest on record) is at least partly due to the deportation program. “You will never hear me blaming Irving’s crime problems on illegal immigration,” Chief Boyd said. But he added that the program “keeps some criminals off of Irving’s streets longer and potentially keeps them off of Irving’s streets for good.”

The city’s political straddle on immigration has angered and confounded Mr. Gears’s opponents. Critics to the right accuse him of opportunism and of shirking his duty to legal residents. Advocates for the immigrants accuse him essentially of undercutting them.

But Mr. Gears’s position is one he seems to struggle every day to defend, said Carlos Quintanilla, a vocal advocate who, like many other Hispanic leaders, initially supported the jail program but now deplores it.

“I call Herb the most tormented man in America,” Mr. Quintanilla said.

The Hard-liners

Lucia Rottenberg, an Irving resident for almost 40 years, was upset in June 2007 when she stood at a City Council meeting in the amphitheater-like chambers at City Hall. Citing fears of crime, disease and economic harm to her city, Ms. Rottenberg called for tougher measures against illegal immigrants and bragged that her husband used his vacation time to volunteer with the Texas Minutemen, a contentious civilian group that tries to keep people from crossing the border illegally.

As she turned to leave the lectern, Mr. Gears leaned into his microphone and stopped her.

“I need to clear something up, because I was told something that was disturbing,” he said. “Were you at a meeting, a club meeting, where applause was given to the comment that anyone who comes over the border should be shot?”

Ms. Rottenberg, who has contributed to one of Mr. Gears’s campaigns and whom Mr. Gears said he considers a friend, confirmed she was at the meeting. “I don’t remember if there was applause or not,” she said, taken aback.

“Did you make that remark?” Mr. Gears asked.

“Yes, I did,” she admitted, her voice rising. “And my frustration is this — ”

Mr. Gears cut her short: “You don’t have to explain it to me. I understand.”

It was at that Council session that the city adopted the federal cooperation program for residency checks inside the jail. It was also a public turning point in the political reorientation of Mr. Gears, who spoke volubly, sometimes irascibly, in defense of the checks while trying to shame those he saw as using immigration to divide the city further.

“I viewed it as something that would be painful to some, and so that was distasteful to me,” Mr. Gears said later about the jail policy. “But we were in a battle here on this issue.”

Like many Texas cities its size, Irving was mostly white a generation ago, a farming town turned sprawling suburb as middle-class families flocked to its affordable neighborhoods.

In 1970, when the city’s population hit 100,000, the Census estimated that less than 5 percent was Hispanic. By 1990 the percentage had tripled, during the next decade it doubled, and it is now thought to be 45 percent or higher. In the fall of 2008, the last time a count was taken, 70 percent of the students enrolled in kindergarten through fifth grade in Irving’s schools were Hispanic.

While no one knows exactly how much of that increase was a result of illegal immigration, Irving was one of several Dallas suburbs that experienced a huge influx of illegal workers as part of the wave that has tripled the nation’s illegal population since 1996. Officials estimate that more than 20 percent of Irving’s 200,000 residents may be in the country illegally.

A drive down North Belt Line Road, one of the city’s commercial spines, takes a visitor past a big Kroger grocery store whose next-door neighbor is a La Michoacana Meat Market almost its equal in size. Both stores sit not far from dozens of Hispanic restaurants, laundries, stores, auto-repair garages and curanderas, or psychics’ shops, scattered throughout the city’s south side.

Some white, longtime Irving residents say illegal immigration has done much more to erode than bolster the city’s older shopping strips and neighborhoods, its image and its property values. They complain to Mr. Gears about white flight from the Irving Mall and about well-kept older residential blocks marred by “patrón houses,” overcrowded single-family homes, clustered with cars, used as bunkhouses for illegal workers.

Beth Van Duyne, a city councilwoman who advocates tougher immigration policies and has battled Mr. Gears, likes to show visitors a favorite exhibit in her case, a hulking big-box store that was once a Wal-Mart. It is now called Irving Bazaar, a battered flea-market-like assortment of merchants with handmade window advertisements in Spanish for wrestling matches and cheap jewelry.

“People hate it,” Ms. Van Duyne said. “It’s just not a good thing to have in your city.”

Such discontent had been rising for years, though as recently as 2005, when Mr. Gears was elected to his first term, it remained well below the political surface. Sue Richardson, the vice president of the Greater Irving Republican Club and probably Mr. Gears’s most persistent opponent, said she believed that it had finally risen into view because many people realized Irving was in the midst of a “silent invasion” from Mexico.

“The people who come here illegally across the border are not educated people,” Ms. Richardson said. “They don’t have any culture or any respect for ours.”

A Political Career

Arriving one fall morning at a regular kaffeeklatsch of longtime residents — a mostly white group that once held court in a diner but, since it closed, has moved to a Mexican restaurant — Mr. Gears made his way around the table shaking hands and telling jokes. “This is where I cut my teeth,” he said. “These are the people who really run the place.”

He looks and often plays the part of a good old boy, a flamboyant dresser with flashy gold-rimmed eyeglasses and rings and cufflinks embossed with pictures of Elizabeth Taylor, who reminds him of his mother when she was young. Mr. Gears’s stamina and self-confidence as a talker can evoke a combination of used-car salesman and Southern Baptist preacher, though his fondness for vodka, Marlboro reds and easygoing profanity might disqualify him from the pulpit.

“You’re going to think I’m making this up, but I was known as Bubba when I was young,” he said. “Now when I go back to the country they call me Mayor Bubba.”

Mr. Gears makes a comfortable living running a financial consulting firm with his wife. But he owes his political career to the poor and the working class, both Hispanic and not. A pivotal issue in his first City Council campaign (the contests are nonpartisan, though Mr. Gears describes himself as a conservative Democrat) was his support for beleaguered mobile home residents, and the “trailer-house vote,” as he likes to call it, made the difference.

He could readily identify with those voters. He was born in East Texas to a deeply troubled mother who raised him and his two sisters mostly by herself while wrestling with poverty and drug addiction; she committed suicide at 63.

Mr. Gears clearly relishes the political life and thrives in it. He raised almost $100,000 in contributions in last year’s mayoral race, a huge sum for such suburban contests. But he says he has no higher political aspirations than perhaps to serve another term or two as mayor. He jokes that “the Democrats wouldn’t have me — especially now — and I wouldn’t have the Republicans.” Still, he counts among his backers powerful and wealthy real-estate developers, and his political options remain open.

In public, Mr. Gears reveals few hints of the internal turmoil that friends describe. His oldest Hispanic friends say they understand why he supports the jail policy but add that the position has always sat uncomfortably on the shoulders of a man who has long worked for Hispanic causes, including serving as president of a local nonprofit group that helps immigrants.

“I think the world of Herb,” said Platon Lerma, who is considered the grandfather of Irving’s Hispanic activists. But Mr. Lerma, 82, said he believed that the immigration checks had betrayed the mayor’s ideals.

“To me the program itself is a crime, in human terms,” he said. “We’re breaking up families. We’re not doing right in the eyes of God.”

But in the next breath he added that Mr. Gears had simply chosen “the best of several evils.” Hispanic residents of Irving do not vote in large numbers, Mr. Lerma explained, and it had become apparent that too many other voters were clamoring for immigration change.

If the election last year had gone to Mr. Gears’s closest opponent, a lawyer, Roland Jeter — who had warned that Irving was becoming a “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants — it would have almost certainly sent the city down a more stringent path.

In his campaign, Mr. Jeter advocated joining a federal program that deputizes police officers as immigration agents. The program has resulted in large numbers of deportations in other cities, and has sometimes led them to initiate other aggressive measures to round up illegal immigrants.

Still, even the more passive approach taken by Irving soon became unpopular among Hispanics. In 2006, before the systematic jail checks began, local police officers were handing about 300 people a year to the federal government for immigration reasons. By the summer of 2007, as many as 300 people a month were entering immigration proceedings, and Mr. Quintanilla, the Hispanic advocate who only three months earlier had spoken in support of the policy at the City Council hearing, helped organize protests against it.

Mr. Gears soon found himself defending the approach on national television while trying to deflect blame toward those he believes are responsible for the problem.

“The complaint that people have with this program,” he said on CNN, “should be directed at the federal government.”

Restive Allies

Now, nearly a year after his re-election, Mr. Gears is still vilified by his conservative opponents while also facing a simmering rebellion from Mr. Quintanilla and other Hispanic leaders, who say the jail policy has unnecessarily damaged the lives of people who have had no serious run-ins with the law.

As of early March, of the 4,074 people whose arrest led to their being handed over to immigration officials, 129 had been charged with violent crimes or illegal possession of weapons, and 714 with other types of serious felonies. In addition, 579 had been charged with driving while intoxicated. The other 2,625 had been arrested for lesser offenses; the largest categories were public intoxication and not having a driver’s license or insurance.

If he were in charge of changing federal policy, Mr. Gears said, he would find a way to allow many illegal immigrants to move toward citizenship. It is a goal that was sought by President George W. Bush and now, in a similar plan, by President Obama.

For now, Mr. Gears is still smiling, still talking and still trying to be the mayor of all of Irving’s inhabitants, even those he knows might soon be gone, like Mr. Urbina, the illegal immigrant who now awaits a deportation hearing.

Not long before Mr. Urbina’s arrest, the mayor tossed out the first pitch at the opening of a Pony Baseball World Series for 9- and 10-year-olds, who had come to town from places as far away as Puerto Rico and Mexico. The event felt like a United Nations game, with national flags and food and blaring music. “Isn’t this great?” Mr. Gears said. “This is what Irving’s all about.”

Using his scant Spanish to throw around the occasional greeting, the mayor took his place on the field in his French-cuffed shirt, sweating alongside players from one of Irving’s teams, their names spelled out on the backs of their jerseys: Gomez, Conaway, Aleman, Shastid, Riker, Flores, Herrin, Childress, Ehrke, Rodriguez.

As the strains of the Puerto Rican anthem faded from the loudspeakers, Mr. Gears took the mound and wound up. His pitch was low, but the catcher scooped it up from the dirt, and the mayor walked off to generous applause.

“Fighting him is kind of like fighting against your brother,” Mr. Quintanilla said of his friend the mayor. “But you put your guard down, and the first thing you know you’re being hit in the face.”

Photograph by Michael Wells

Municipal de Fútbol is distributed by D.A.P.

UFL All-Star Weekend
Sunday, March 29th, 5 till 9pm

Parkside FC will be representing on the UFL All-Star team with 3 of our players (Moises Francia #8, Johnathon Law #10, Ricardo Martinez #21) and our keeper, Fernando Dimas #1. Come watch as top talent from the Union Football League takes on Hollywood United FC.

5pm — Atletico 1315 vs Telemundo
7pm — UFL All-Stars vs Hollywood United FC
9pm — Awards and Certificates

Rafael Rozendaal’s food diary. I don’t know why I like these (online food diaries) so much. Maybe I appreciate the humanity in such an oversaturated and therefore overly postured medium.

Who Speaks For Earth? — Episodes of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos available on Hulu.

via Lined & Unlined

My friend Andrew got a digital camera, check out his flicks of Los Angeles from his cycle, etc…

Happy New Year / First day of Spring

by Rebecca Cole

Reporting from Washington — This year, the vegetables served at the White House will be as locally grown as possible — some right on the South Lawn.

After a campaign by gardeners and sustainable food activists, the first family has decided to dig up part of the White House grounds for a vegetable garden. In a ceremony today, First Lady Michelle Obama and local elementary students will break ground for the project.

It is part of the first lady’s promotion of healthful food for her daughters, Malia and Sasha, as well as for the nation. But like many parents, the Obamas have had mixed results: Michelle Obama recently said a version of “creamless” creamed spinach by White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford still was a bit too “green” for the kids.

More than 100,000 people have lobbied the president online to plant a garden on the White House lawn, according to Kitchen Gardeners International, a coalition of gardeners whose mission is to inspire and teach people to grow their own food. The group’s Eat the View campaign to plant “high-impact gardens in high-profile places” urged the first family to start an edible garden within the first 100 days of the Obama administration.

Launched in February 2008 and spearheaded by Roger Doiron, a gardener in Scarborough, Maine, the movement hoped to have the president’s family set the right example in terms of healthful eating — “gardening for the greater good,” as Doiron said.

“It begins at home,” Doiron said. “That’s where we start. And if we get a number of people together carrying out these small actions, it will speak volumes and add up.”

Since the early 1990s, food-activist pioneers such as Berkeley restaurateur Alice Waters and author Michael Pollan have lobbied for an “edible landscape” across the 16 acres of White House grounds.

Though the Clintons did have a small rooftop garden that grew vegetables and herbs and Laura Bush made sure organic foods were served in the residence, this is the first full-scale planting on the lawn in more than 60 years — since Eleanor Roosevelt had a victory garden during World War II.

“I’m just so gratified that this idea that seemed as right as rain from the beginning” has finally taken hold, said Waters, owner of the renowned Chez Panisse.

“Food is precious. It comes from the land,” she added. “And we have to take care of the land in order to nourish ourselves. It’s very hard to talk about food without talking about the garden.”

From a chilly corner of Maine, Doiron’s small plot of land yielded $2,100 worth of produce from 35 different crops last year. The message, he said, is that even in these difficult economic times, when families are struggling financially and psychologically, there are creative ways to put healthful food on the table.

“Even if families can start with something small this season, they’re going to come away feeling empowered,” Doiron said. “There are things that we can do, even though we feel like we are up against incredible odds.”

Waters said she was especially pleased that at the White House garden’s groundbreaking, Michelle Obama would be surrounded by children — an aspect near and dear to her heart.

As a founder of the Edible Schoolyard, a program in Berkeley and New Orleans to integrate organic gardens into schools, Waters wants all children to learn that vegetables and fruit come from the ground, not a store.

“If we make a beautiful place that children can walk through on tours of the White House, we can broadcast that message around the world,” Waters said. “It’s such a beautiful picture. It’s confirming and affirming their interest in the garden.”

via South Willard