Day: April 13, 2009

Gentrification re: Loaded

Frozen Tropics mentioned it first. Sankofa Video and Books up on Georgia Avenue will be ‘exploring’ the issue of gentrification this week. According to them:

The panel discussions will allow the community to thoroughly examine the implications of gentrification, gentrification and racism, the institutionalized gentrification, the economic implication of gentrification, the implication of culture gentrification, the appropriation of African American cultural icons for the benefits of the ‘gentrifiers’, and the following questions will be addressed:

Have they come to live with us or displace us?
Who owns the planet?
Gentrification: Latest stage of colonial power – or – it’s relationship to colonialism?

I see a bunch of loaded questions and statements. Yes, the word gentrification is loaded, but you can additionally pack it with more explosives and how you pair it with other loaded statements.
I’m going to take a wild guess and say the answer to question one will be displacement. Maybe the idea of living with people you’re implying are colonial oppressors may be batted around for a minute. But seriously, colonialist oppressor is not a nice title and you damage your radical whatever cred by coddling ‘those people’. Does one become a colonial oppresser by virtue of simply living east of 16th St NW? Is this an opportunity to rail against the Fair Housing Act, which allows people to legally live wherever the heck they want.
Here’s a question, is the ideal located in places in DC (parts of NE & SE) where gentrification is not occurring and probably will never even bubble slightly in the next decade or two?

Frost Free gardening

April 10th was supposed to be the last frost date for Spring, so I got out this weekend and played in dirt.
Inside the house I’ve been growing tomatoes from seed in the window. I took a few of the balcony hybrids and replanted them in larger pots. I also have some not-exactly red type tomato seedlings growing in the window as well as I love the odd varieties, the yellows, the green stripes, the orangish and whathaveyou.
Last year, some heirloom varieties we (we being me and neighbor B) grew were duds, producing nothing but lots of vines. I’m going to blame the light, or lack of it, in the rear yard. The front yard produced a bunch of rudely shaped San Marizano (?) plum tomatoes suffering from mild blossom rot. There were tons, and tons of cherry tomatoes that were great for snacking and I’ll do them again this year. The Russian heirloom variety tomato was a late season type that produced these huge monster tomatoes that most of the time I did not let ripen on the vine because one part would look 1/2 way to rotting. Having them ripen in a sunny window (to fight whatever mold-like thing growing on one side) was my best bet.
Besides tomatoes I planted some bean seeds. I’m doing the french string bean thing again. I really enjoyed similar beans I had grown before and a meal at Corduroy featuring buttery string beans reminded me of how great this vegetable is.