Recent
Slam Bunting
from The City Paper
8 May 2008
On Medina Street in South Philly you aren’t likely to find a tanner or a basket weaver or a potter or a rug maker or soup ladler, a knife sharpener or stone cutter. On this hidden cutout between Seventh and Eighth, Wharton and Reed, its name derived from the Arabic word for “city,” there are no drying spices, no spools of colorful thread, no bottles of perfume. The 20 or so walled medinas of Northern Africa are cacophonous, labyrinthine places of dizzying intensity. Half-block Medina Street, with its weeping cherry tree, Zagar mosaic (Cristo Rey on horseback, no less), and hanging flower baskets, isn’t. “Oasis Street” would be more suitable.
It is possible that Medina was used to signify the street’s position between two lively curb markets, the Jewish market on Seventh Street, long defunct, and the Italian Market, which may be the closest thing we have to the intimacy and sensuality of a medina. Unfortunately, the street isn’t listed in Bob Alotta’s almanac of Philadelphia street names, Mermaids, Monasteries, Cherokees and Custer, so we’re left to imagine that whoever gave Medina its name also named Titan, the miniature passage one block away.
But what may have been dry humor a century ago is standard marketing practice today. A quick glance at Toll Brothers offerings reveals Plumstead Chase and Charlestown Meadows, Dutchess Farm Estates, Doylestown Woods, Rivercrest and Regency, the Reserve at Pond Creek. We all know what you won’t find in these places: meadows, woods, farms, rivers, and ponds. This sort of thing seems well-suited to extol pretend environmental virtues. An ad in the current issue of Harper’s says that for reaching 21 City MPG, Chevrolet’s enormous Tahoe Hybrid is the “Green Car of the Year;” another claims Shell Oil is producing “cleaner city air.”
In the same issue, Kevin Phillips argues that the culture of lying extends well beyond Madison Avenue into what was once imagined to be sacrosanct in a liberal democracy: objective bureaucracy. By deliberately falsifying economic data, every administration since Kennedy has molded key indicators to bend public opinion. Food, energy, and housing have been removed from the government’s gauge of inflation, the Consumer Price Index, rendering it false — and irrelevant to most consumers. Phillips says this finagling has resulted in an “opacity crisis,” where economic measurements are too complicated to be understood. “Intricacy,” he writes, “has become a conduit for deception.”
And as David Barstow reported …
Book
“In the stories, you will discover not only the vastness of the city’s landscape but also its people. My city is their stories. It is a powerful, reckless place.”
In the spirit of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, Song of the City shouts its praise for American city life and for the curbside democracy that enables Popkin’s “crush of voices” to coexist in the microcosm that is one city block.
Writing of Song of the City, the literary critic Carlin Romano said that the work “was exquisitely literary … electric … . Those who care about cities everywhere will respond to Popkin’s policy passion, his urban arabesques.” The Midwest book review noted that Song of the City “Embodies the quintessential human experience.” In his 2006 book Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living in the Presence of the Past, historian Steve Conn wrote, “[Song of the City] is the finest book about contemporary Philadelphia I have come across.”
