See, I’m a guy with an understanding of how raw materials become fabrics become garments. Anyone who pays a little attention can know how things work, and for someone who uses yarn a lot, this knowledge becomes integral lore. If I needed to, I could construct a drop spindle and spin and ply my own yarn; probably, most knitters, crocheters, and weavers could.

This is where today’s little diatribe starts: at the cost of producing a fabric product. For something hand-made, these costs can skyrocket if the effort is exceeding a certain level; there’s no real way to produce things like socks in an economical amount of time, unless you’re selling them for hundreds of dollars a pair; say, 8$/hour with 10$ for materials; most pairs of socks take at least 30 hours to complete, if you’re lucky. Suddenly that’s 250$/pair; (friends of mine, take note: that’s why I don’t sell socks. You can’t afford them, and if I give them to you as a gift, I damn well expect them to be worn.)

What is shocking, though, is going to the Burberry website and seeing a scarf cost 400$ or more; that’s just absurd. That’s fucking absurd, for a machined product. Especially one which uses yarn that I can acquire from an online retailer who is marking up that yarn, having acquired mill ends of it, for about 20-30$ a cone; each cone, if I purchased the four colours necessary to weave one of those scarves, would cover the production of probably four or five scarves, all for around a hundred dollars. Somehow, you expect me to believe that your machine-produced scarves are worth 400$? Bullshit.

On the other hand, I’ll sell people scarves for 350$, with better workmanship than the Burberry product. You can take orders in the comments.

I get it. We’re queer, so we need to support other minorities. At some point, though, you’re just ignoring the politics and actual circumstances of certain « oppressed minorities » in order to support them. There’s a strong a recent case of QM’s selective blindness which I’ll deal with here.

QM decided recently that they should support a group that is protesting the efforts by « Pink Money » to clean up the Village, to the detriment of the homeless living there. They pay some lip service to the fact that members of the transient community are drug addicts, and yes, they’re queer. However, the group goes off the deep end when they suggest that really, public sanitation isn’t so big a deal that urinating in an alley is a big problem, so why is it a misdemeanour? This was about the moment when I put palm to forehead and wondered why QM thought this was deserving of support, given the fact that this particular group seems to be focused mostly on continuing to support urban decay. That was when I realised what was seriously underlying the discussion here, a core misunderstanding of why things were happening the way they were. QM — and the group they were supporting — were ignoring the underlying malaise to suggest that no treatment was necessary in the first place, because these people are here. Incidentally, and entirely separately of this e-mail from QM, I’ve come to develop a new personal theory about endemic homelessness in Montréal, and notably the strange characteristics of the community here.

One of the defining aspects of a large section of the homeless community is that they’re tattooed, professionally pierced, and have post-punk haircuts, often with heavily dyed hair. To me, although the first two could easily have been acquired before becoming homeless, that last signifies a vast separation between interests and situation, what I’m coming to deem the Horse and Water problem. The adage goes, « You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. » I see this as an accurate depiction of the problem in Montréal, that there are support services available — most likely not quite sufficient, as they always are — but the people for whom they are provided do not care to use them, because their current situation fulfils their needs. Unfortunately, their current situation involves urban decay as a core feature; QM seems to ignore this reality and instead deem the homeless an oppressed minority with whom they must show solidarity. They really didn’t learn after the Queeriot debacle?

On-topic, then. Knitting is one of the things I love to do, but often ignore for long periods of time. Like playing music. Once I have (more) time, I’ll return to playing the violin. Honest.

Now, really on-topic. Every year, it seems, I return to knitting just as exams and assignments start piling one atop each other; whenever I’m studying and just reading, I start knitting to avoid boredom and stress. Plus, it produces materials that I can give other people. Really, the only problem I see is in acquiring the proper materials here. In Canada, I see a fascinating conundrum of fashionable, modern stores — and low consumerism. Online shopping? Yeah, that doesn’t happen. Stores regularly have no internet presence here, or the least possible presence, which makes acquiring yarn quite difficult, since there’s only a few yarn shops around here.

As for what I’m working on, well, I’m finishing up some socks, and I’m about to work on another pair of socks based on a similar pattern; other things, well … those are secret.

An immediate consequence of car-minimal living is the difference in road planning and implementation; currently, roads are designed for the large blocks of metal that we drive around on them, and to mitigate the damage that results from the repeated stress inflicted on them. By moving to bikes and various types of light mopeds (for some uses which will be explored later) we reduce the stress on the roads, and can use far lighter, easier-to-manipulate materials; higher quantities of recycled rubber from industrial sources and recycled tyres may be included in the surfacing mix, decreasing the environmental impact of their implementation, while only using light vehicles on these roads reduces the wear and tear of the seasons (vital in states in the northern regions of the US), reducing the costs of repairing the roads. The final result of this change in that regard, then, is vastly reduced road assessments (since we’re using on average, 1/3 of the current material used, of a more sustainable and less expensive variety, and needing far less frequent repairs.)

Another direct result of changing to car-minimal living is the change in what support services would be readily available: gas stations and auto mechanics would be essentially nonexistent within the city, only prevalent near the parking ramps around the periphery; on the other hand, bike stores and bike mechanics would be prevalent throughout the whole region, from the city core to the periphery, even well-distributed in the residential areas. Most likely, bike collectives would likewise become prevalent, as they would provide easier access to components and tools for those who are interested in repairing their bikes themselves.

Because of the shift to bicycles, I would expect some other changes in areas such as grocery shopping; because people would be bringing their purchases home by bicycle, the more logical choice would be to return to neighbourhood supermarkets and greengrocers, as opposed to today’s hypermarkets; residents would buy what food they needed for a few days, instead of doing a week’s worth of shopping at a time. This same change would most likely affect the way discount retailers function as well, since smaller stores that cater to separate markets (clothing, housewares, furnishings, etc.) would be at an advantage when someone is shopping with more limited storage space than a car or SUV provides; of course, there are workarounds to provide as much storage space when riding a bike, but the point holds that smaller stores based around an individual focus would be more competitive in such a market.

Although there is a cost burden associated with using mass transit, compared to regularly buying gas at prices at 3,50$ or above for a gallon, such a tradeoff is certainly viable. Other factors to consider are the lack of incidential expenses for cars, such as replacing brakes, tyres, muffler, etc. Although brake pads and tyres on bikes do need to be replaced, the difference is that they are far, far less expensive than for cars. Overall, these changes would generally leave residents with more disposable income available for purchases or savings, both of which benefit the local economy.

Outside the studio, there’s no such requirements. No boundaries on when a piece is done, only playing for its own sake. While you can arrange recitals, by necessity, they are only small affairs, individually promoted, generally only one musician. This is where I am now, and it’s a bit frightening; my whole musical life, I’ve been shifting from goal to goal, advancing from piece to piece—but now? Now I have a repertoire, pieces I know and pieces I’m working on, but I don’t have goals, I just have a desire. I don’t know if that’s enough.

I guess what I need to do is find other musicians in the same position as me, and work it out from there. Arrange small group recitals, see if we can get a pianist to assist us, and build from there.

As an extension of the green roof concept, such design could be applied to car parking; near city-edge transit hubs, large car parks could be installed, designed so that as little exposed surface was bare concrete as possible. The end result would most likely involve partially underground parking, while any aboveground levels would be concealed by the planted outer surface, with the roof being entirely planted-over. All of these design choices are made to increase the city’s overall albedo, allowing it to reflect more heat away from the surface, etc. etc.

Anyone who has ever driven a manual car knows the hesitation that goes along with starting from a full stop, as there’s a certain threshold that needs to be overcome to keep the car from stalling out in first. However, with a bike, stopping and then restarting is more like coming to a complete stop, turning off the car, taking the key out of the ignition, and then putting the key back in, restarting, and /then/, finally, pressing down on the accelerator. In short, when biking, you don’t want to stop. With current car-oriented cities, bicyclists need to stop all the time: at stoplights; cross streets; even T-intersections, where we are legally obligated to stop (even though we rarely do, in that case.) When designing a city based around bikes, however, there is every reason to attempt to avoid reasons to stop, and they are far cheaper to implement for bicycles and walkers than for cars.

A first example of such workarounds would be an overpass and underpass system for managing « corners » : in this case, an intersection would function like two highways crossing, with one route raised over the other by a bridge, and with interchange-style links to transition between them. One path would dip, and the other would rise only enough to provide a reasonable clearance for crossing beneath it. This system eliminates the need to stop for cross-traffic, and, as it’s designed for bikes and walkers, need not be built to the same load requirements nor the size of regular car bridges. This, in general, would lead to smooth traffic flow, even as it reduces the need for traffic lights and their management (all a part of a later topic, the economic changes this alteration would cause.)

An extension of using bikes as the main transit system is the need for adequate pathside lighting, especially around these proposed overpass arrangements; ideally, every part of the path would be fairly well-lit, to a distance of approximately 5 metres on either side, with no concealing shrubs within that distance, either. Additionally, a blue EMERGENCY pylon with a push-button 911 system would be installed every hundred metres or more, with benches placed at regular intervals along both sides of the paths. Bike parking would also be prevalent, in most cases simple racks of the style that are common now, but in some areas, especially in the city core and near transit stops, electronic bike lockers, controlled from a central kiosk at each location, would allow for secure storage of a bicycle and any equipment associated with it, and, if solar panels were placed on top of the units, it would allow them to power themselves in the proper conditions, and even supply power to the grid when they could; the rest of the time, they would draw from the grid. The net effect of having bike storage compared to blacktop for cars to park on: once again, reduced surface area to absorb and reflect heat, resulting in, again, a reduction in the heat island effect, and a decreased carbon footprint for the entire city.

With constructing a city and a transit system, certain elements must be taken into consideration: having all the workers in the downtown routing through one central rail station is a complete fallacy, as the chaos that would result on any given working day would slow down operations for far longer than a usual rush hour; as such, ideally there would be between three and five central stations: one connected to the inner-city rail station (convergent between at least one east-west and north-south subway line), and then between two and four other stations to handle traffic along lines going out to the residential and industrial areas surrounding the city core. These additional stations would allow the core station to be an interface between intra-city and inter-city transit, while still collecting connexions between lines; if the distances between them were large enough, a circulator running through these additional routing stations would be sensible; such a circulator also seems sensible for adding at various distances out into the residential and industrial regions, but that would depend on the desire to travel between destinations without simply riding a bike. This point brings us to the next topic, bike trails as road replacement and overarching transit mechanism.

Bikes are useful, human-powered transit; this comes as a surprise to no one who’s developed a sense of balance that can stand not actually being in contact with the ground personally, and who has fun tooling about, jockeying with cars for road space. To that effect, this new city concept is based around their use on a regular basis, and would be designed to make the most of their idiosyncracies and benefits, as well as take advantage of the far lower costs of maintenance associated with them: bike paths, even heavily-utilised ones such as the Greenway in Minneapolis, deteriorate far more slowly than roads, and can be built with more recycled rubber and other less dense materials, reducing the amount of heat they trap as opposed to asphalt. Additionally, a given bike trail is anywhere between 1/2 and 1/3 the size of a comparable road: this reduction alone in the amount of open blacktop in a city would significantly reduce the heat island effect, especially in conjunction with other enhancements which will be laid out in later posts.

I decided to take on this experiment in part because it was brought up in an IRC chatroom I frequent, but also because I’ve found that it is quite possible to not use a car at all in a city with a well-developed transit system; Montréal is a good example of this, especially near the downtown core. By no means do I suggest that the city should be entirely car-free, as there are some things for which having a car available is superior, for instance travelling outside the city, but at the same time, the majority of what is done in a city doesn’t require a car, certainly not a vehicle that seats four or five, holding only one person. My goal here is to provoke thought about urban development and city planning, as well as about the usual American lifestyle; I’ll be addressing the changes that would result from the basic tenet of car-minimal living in later posts.

The general approach to these posts will be this: this post discusses the what and the why of a car-minimal city, and the following few posts will each address a specific how associated with such a choice — I am not discussing retrofitting existing cities, that will be after these posts, as it is better to start with a wholly new development for this sort of planning, and then approach the redevelopment of a city with a different core transit system. As such, we start with how the concept of streets changes when moving to a car-minimal system, and from there, its impact on city design and long-distance transit.

So don’t tell me I’m not born this way, or even imply otherwise.

What’s prompted this reaction is an event, where a QM exec, a professor of cultural studies, and a professor of sexual identity are asking if we really are « born this way » or not; do we « have some control over who we fuck? »

That’s a dangerous question to ask.

For decades, the argument posed against allowing gay rights was that we « choose to be like this », that somehow we’ve chosen to act in a manner « against nature ». I’ve read plenty about this tripe, and to see people supposedly wearing my colours arguing the same way turns my stomach. This is an argument with historical context, which we ignore at our peril.

The argument is that we are told that it is only okay to be gay if we have no choice, due to birth. The problem is, that ignores the history of our struggle, and simply argues against Lady GaGa’s recent blatantly consumerist hit song, « Born This Way ». The true argument lies a bit below the surface, and requires that we consider the history of the gay rights movement. I said a paragraph ago that anti-gay rights commentators and bigots have for years argued that we choose to act in this manner, that we choose our sexuality. « Born This Way » is a potent (albeit heavy-handed) response to that argument: we are not just who we choose to be, we are also born with some set of attractions. If you can choose which gender you want to have sex with, you’re just more fluid in your attractions. I know that I, personally, rate a six on the Kinsey Scale (I often joke that I really rate a seven, but that would be impossible.) If you can choose, you’re probably more a two or a three. So, yes, some people can choose. I can’t, and that’s just life. However, arguing that because some people can choose, everyone can, is a dangerous precedent and a patent falsehood. « If some, all » is a logical construct that only works in mathematics, and any logician or mathematician would tell you so.

Before I continue in this polemic, I’m going to suggest some songs to listen to, because unlike « Born This Way », they deal with coming to terms with one’s sexuality, not simply accepting from the start. The songs are by Ray Boltz, a Christian Rock singer/songwriter who came out to his family a few years ago: « True » and « I Chose », both off his album True, released just in 2010. This is the sole Christian Rock album I own, and it truly bridges Christian Rock and, I suppose, some sort of Queer Rock genre, if such a thing could even be said to exist. This entire album is an indictment of the mentality that sexuality can simply be changed, and instead presents a queer-positive view of accepting yourself. If « Born This Way » seems too consumerist, give this a try.

Now that I’ve cooled down a little, I’m going to break down the remaining arguments I have against this idea that we can simply choose « who to fuck[.] » (Yes, I am quoting the e-mail.)

What is this « right track » ? How about being able to live openly, peacefully, and lovingly? I know that I could have used more music telling me it was okay to be who I really knew I was, three to four years ago. Four years ago, my life fell apart because who I was was in conflict with who I thought I was. This cognitive dissonance led to the worst year of my life, when I couldn’t accept myself for being myself, thinking something was wrong. Although I think « Born This Way » is over-done, and I prefer « I Chose » to get my point across, it all has the same message, which is a message we shouldn’t be arguing against right now: just because you’re not like 90% of the population doesn’t mean something’s wrong, it just means you’re a little unusual.

So, yes, I was « Born This Way », Queer McGill. Never doubt it, because when you need to ask yourself that question, I hope you have someone else to rely on; you’ll need it.