Around 6:30 p.m. a group of young people I parsed as students in an art class, standing together on the sidewalk sketching in their sketchbooks. It seemed to be a timed exercise of some kind: sketch a while, then on to the next place, in this case westward on Washington. [photo] [photo] (Art taking place publicly).
Archive for October, 2011
Main & Depot
Yellow mums spelling out “M” twice. Sponsored by First Martin. According to First Martin, the dual “M” is not meant to spell out “MM” but rather, it’s two block Ms, one from each angle. With just one, it would be bisected by the traffic pole. This way you get one whole M. Still, not bad if your initials are MM. [photo]
Main & Catherine
UM: Book Preview
On The Wolverine, Jonathan Chait previews John U. Bacon’s “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football,” due out Oct. 25. Chait writes: ”It’s extremely rare for a college sports program to give an author complete access to everything for a year, let alone three. Bacon was embedded with the team so long that the players and coaches practically stopped noticing he was around, and the insider perspective he gained is unparalleled. You simply don’t get any other chance to know what it’s like to watch the coaches argue with each other while breaking down film, hang out with players at a campus party, sit on the inside of full team meetings.” [Source]
Forum for Six AAPS Board Candidates
The Ann Arbor area League of Women Voters (LWV) will hold a candidate forum on Monday, Oct. 3 from 7-8 p.m. at the Community Television Network studio, 2805 South Industrial Highway, Ann Arbor. The public is invited to attend but not to participate. The forum will also be broadcast live on CTN’s CitiTV Channel 19.
Two seats on the Ann Arbor Public Schools board of education are up for election on the Nov. 8, 2011 ballot, each for four-year terms. The seats are currently held by Simone Lightfoot and Andy Thomas, who are both seeking re-election. Challenging the incumbents are: Albert Howard, Ahmar Iqbal, Patrick Leonard, and Larry Murphy. [Full Story]
Art Commission Preps for Dreiseitl Dedication
Ann Arbor public art commission (Sept. 28, 2011): Commissioners spent a portion of their monthly meeting discussing details of the Oct. 4 dedication of Herbert Dreiseitl’s bronze sculpture, the city’s largest public art project to date funded from the Percent for Art program.
On the morning of Sunday, Oct. 2, Herbert Dreiseitl (center, in maroon cap) meets in front of city hall with the design/fabrication team for his sculpture. To the right is Rick Russel of Future Group, the Warren firm that fabricated the bronze sculpture. To the left of Dreiseitl is Patrick Judd of the Ann Arbor-based Conservation Design Forum, which helped with the design. In the background, electrician Jim Fackert hooks up wiring to operate the blue lights embedded in the bronze. (Photos by the writer.)
The installation was still underway – blue glass lights embedded in the elongated metal panel hadn’t been wired, and water wasn’t yet flowing over the sculpture. But those elements are expected to be in place by Tuesday evening, when the German artist will be among those gathering on the plaza in front of city hall for the dedication ceremony. [Dreiseitl and members of the design/fabrication team have been testing the lighting and water flow, but it will be formally "turned on" at the dedication ceremony.]
The Percent for Art program was also a topic of discussion at AAPAC’s Sept. 28 meeting, in light of recent proposed action by the city council. A council resolution sponsored by councilmember Sabra Briere – who attended AAPAC’s meeting but didn’t formally address the group – would explicitly exclude sidewalk and street repair from projects that could be tapped to fund public art. Briere’s proposal would also require that any money allocated for public art under the program be spent within three years, or be returned to its fund of origin. The council ultimately postponed action until their second meeting in November, following a working session on the Percent for Art program that’s scheduled for Nov. 14.
In the context of those possible changes, Margaret Parker made an impassioned plea for her fellow commissioners to increase their efforts at public outreach. Many people didn’t know about all the work that was being done through the Percent for Art program, she said. By not getting their message out, she cautioned, ”that can be the undoing of all the work that we’ve done.”
Updates on several projects were given during the meeting, and commissioners took one formal vote – giving approval to set up a task force that will select public art for the East Stadium bridges project. Other projects in the works include a mural at Allmendinger Park, artwork in the lobby of the new justice center, a possible partnership with the Detroit Institute of Arts’ Inside|Out program, and public art for a rain garden to be created at the corner of Kingsley and First.
Parker also made a pitch for a possible way to fund temporary art – such as performances or short-term exhibitions – that can’t be paid for by the Percent for Art program, as stipulated by city ordinance. Rather than describing it as temporary art, she said, perhaps AAPAC could characterize such temporary work as promotion for public art in general, or tie it to promotion of a permanent piece, like the Dreiseitl sculpture. There was no action taken on this idea, other than an apparent consensus to explore that possibility further. [Full Story]
Monthly Milestone: Measuring Time, Activity
Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s launch – is an opportunity for either the publisher or the editor of The Chronicle to touch base with readers on topics related to this publication.
Ann Arbor Active Against ALS (A2A3) is sponsoring a two-way swim across the English Channel to raise money for ALS research. This image links to the website, where non-channel swimmers can help the cause by keeping track of their own swimming and running milestones.
It’s also a time that we highlight, with gratitude, our local advertisers, and ask readers to consider subscribing voluntarily to The Chronicle to support our work.
The appearance of this monthly column does not mark any particular quantifiable achievement, but rather the simple passage of time. It’s just an occasion to note that another month is in the books for The Chronicle.
It’s a measurement of survival.
Other kinds of milestones are easy enough to contemplate as well. Among those are the finer-grained milestones – the odd statistics that reflect the actual activity that goes into the survival of a publication. For example, a query of the Chronicle’s database shows 540 government meeting reports filed in a little over three years. Included in 141 of those reports is the public commentary of Thomas Partridge. The database also contains 2,832 Stopped.Watched. observations. Of those, 614 were made along Liberty Street.
These smaller kinds of incremental milestones are important, too, because they reflect not the passage of time, but the actual stuff out of which survival is made. I was reminded of this by news of an upcoming event, sponsored by Ann Arbor Active Against ALS (A2A3), which continues that organization’s effort to ensure survival for patients with ALS – a neurological disorder commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
The event itself will take place next summer. It’s a six-woman relay swim across the English Channel, in both directions. That’s 42 miles of swimming. As part of the fundraising effort, A2A3 is inviting people to do their own swims (or runs) locally. They’ve computed a running-miles equivalent of 73.5 miles for a one-way channel swim. The six-woman relay hopes to break the world record for such a channel swim of 18 hours 59 minutes.
Thinking about people who want to participate in the event locally, most of them would not be able to hop into Half Moon Lake and swim for 19 hours. And most local runners would not be able to lace up a pair of shoes and hit the pavement, knocking out 73.5 miles all in one go.
So A2A3 is providing a log sheet for those who register to participate. That way people can keep track of their miles over a longer period of time. There’s no requirement that people complete their miles at the same time the channel swim takes place, in the summer of 2012. You can start right now.
Those log sheets will measure milestones that aren’t counted with a calendar. And those are the kind of milestones I want to think about this month. [Full Story]
Huron & Fifth Avenue
Herbert Dreiseitl, wearing a University of Minnesota cap, is in front of city hall on Sunday morning, inspecting the installation of his sculpture along with other members of the design/fabrication team and the electrician, who is doing electrical work on the piece. [photo] [photo] They’ll be testing the lighting and water flow several times between now and the Oct. 4 dedication, which starts at 7 p.m. When asked why he was wearing the University of Minnesota cap, Dreiseitl said he’d been lecturing there recently and had simply needed a hat because of the cold weather. I did not ask if he attended Saturday’s football game – it seemed unlikely.
Ann & Division
Truck parked illegally while unloading parts of new sculpture at city hall gets towed. [photo]
Sunday Funnies: Bezonki
A2: Native Americans
On his blog “there is no gap,” Karl Pohrt posts the text of a talk he gave at the annual Native American Solidarity Sunday for the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation in Ann Arbor: ”I thought I’d briefly talk about Native ideas regarding where we fit into the universe. Some of these ideas are very different from our own. The Marxist anthropologist Stanley Diamond said that whenever we encounter people who do things differently than we do, it is an implicit critique of the way we do things. Diamond went on to say that the role of the engaged anthropologist is to make that critique explicit.” [Source]
A2: “Feynman”
The Washington Post reviews “Feynman,” a graphic novel written by Jim Ottaviani of Ann Arbor about the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman. From the review: ”In ‘Feynman,’ read about how the irrepressible and colorfully sketched PhD pulls pranks on his fellow researchers on the Manhattan Project. Watch as the rascally professor solves the Dirac Equation. … In one panel of the 300-page book, Feynman spins dinner plates to unlock secrets of quantum mechanics; in another he humiliates a NASA official during the Rogers Commission investigation of the Challenger explosion.” [Source] Read more on Ottaviani in his recent Teeter Talk interview on The Chronicle.
Liberty near State
2:25 p.m. Sept. 30 Man urinating in alley between David’s Books & old Borders store. Partly obscured by city trash bins, emphasis on “partly.” [Continued in comment section.]
Committee Briefed on Downtown Sidewalks
As the Nov. 8, 2011 general election approaches, the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority is considering the implications that a ballot question might have on the DDA’s tax increment finance (TIF) district. The ballot question asks voters to approve a sidewalk repair millage that would levy a new tax of 0.125 mills. A mill is $1 for every $1,000 of a property’s taxable value.
Part of the discussion at the DDA transportation, operations and construction committee meeting included the “two-inch” rule on vertical sidewalk displacement. A law working its way through the state legislature would establish that a city is presumed to have maintained a sidewalk properly, but that can be rebutted by evidence showing that the proximate cause of an injury was a “vertical discontinuity” defect of 2 inches or more in the sidewalk. (Photo by the writer.)
Members of the DDA’s transportation, operations and construction committee were briefed on that and a number of other issues at its regular monthly meeting on Wednesday, Sept. 28. (The committee has a combined function for what were at different times in the past three separate committees.)
The committee was also briefed on: (1) the status of the getDowntown program; (2) a parking communications plan aimed at evening employees; (3) the financial picture for the city’s public parking system; and (4) the results of a parking customer satisfaction survey.
Committee members were somewhat surprised and disappointed to learn that the city council’s policy on the use of proceeds from the proposed sidewalk millage would place restrictions on using millage money inside the boundaries of the DDA’s TIF district.
The city council’s Aug. 4 resolution authorizing ballot language for the proposed 0.125 mill tax places a limitation on the use of funds inside the TIF district, though the wording on the ballot does not include the limitation. The resolution states that inside the DDA district, only those sidewalks adjacent to single- and two-family houses (but not other commercial properties) would be included in a millage-supported sidewalk repair program.
A resolution of intent on the use of the sidewalk millage, which includes the restriction inside the DDA TIF district, was postponed from the council’s Sept. 19 meeting, and will be taken up by the council again on Oct. 3.
At their Wednesday meeting, DDA committee members were also apprised that the getDowntown program, which draws the majority of its funding from the DDA, will not be folded into the DDA as had previously been planned. Instead, the program’s two staff members will remain employees of the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority. The getDowntown program’s status has been a question since the Ann Arbor Area Chamber of Commerce (now the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Regional Chamber) two years ago pulled out of the four-way partnership that supported getDowntown. The remaining three partners are the city of Ann Arbor, the DDA and the AATA.
The committee was also briefed on elements of the DDA’s communications plan that’s aimed at downtown evening employees, in connection with possibly extending parking meter enforcement hours past 6 p.m. Other parking-related issues on the committee’s agenda included a structure-by-structure breakdown of the financial performance of the city’s parking garages, as well as an overview of the results of a regular parking system survey used to evaluate Republic Parking, the DDA’s parking contractor.
This report focuses on sidewalks and getDowntown. [Full Story]