Good morning, RVA: VOTE!

Good morning, RVA! It’s 43 °F, and you can expect highs in the mid 60s today. It’s looking like a great day to get out and vote!

Water cooler

It is Election Day in Virginia! You’ve got from now until 7:00 PM to vote for your representatives in the General Assembly and, depending on where you live, a supervisor here or a councilmember there. You can find the location of your polling place here, and you can follow along over here as the results start to come in. And, for all of today, GRTC routes in the City are fare-free.

For 5th District folks, a list of things to read, watch, and think about:

Read through these questionnaires spanning an extensive set of topics from the Mayorathon: A Focus on the 5th.

Queue up these candidate conversation videos from some VCU broadcast journalism students.

Watch this video from Candidate Da Silva—it starts out with him jumping into a creek. It’s the best local campaign video I’ve seen.

Download Candidate Williamson’s 71-page comprehensive policy guide, which I find delightful.

Check out Candidate Lynch’s list of endorsements, including a recent one from the Richmond Free Press.

Poke around on VPAP to look at the fundraising breakdowns. Candidate McCoy had more cash contributions of $100 or less than any other candidates (but it was close—just six more than Candidate Williamson).

I don’t have a fun fact for the three other candidates running, but here’s Candidate Taylor’s website, Candidate Miles’s Facebook page, and Chuck Richardson definitely still exists (just not on the internet).

Whittney Evans at VPM adds some confusing context to the recent story about evictions in Creighton Court. Honestly, this sounds like a mess and continues to highlight the need for RRHA to get a handle on and add some compassion to their comms and customer service work.

Early Sunday morning, a driver hit and severely injured two people walking on 4200 block of Kingsley Avenue on the City’s Southside. Police say that one of the victims is “listed in life-threatening condition.” How many of these pedestrian deaths and injuries do I have to write about before the City starts to at least acknowledge that we have a dangerous safety problem on our streets? How many serious crashes have I written about in just the last couple of weeks? Where’s the rapid response by police and engineers? Where are the public statements from our elected leaders promising to do something (anything!)? I love this thread from Louise Lockett Gordon, Director of Bike Walk RVA, which says, in part, “It’s still early and I’m not sure of the full details of today’s crash…I do know it’s another painful reminder that we can’t wait on this issue. So what to do in the face of long timelines? Claim the space.” Make sure you tap into that thread and look at the pictures she posts about ways even places with suburban land use patterns can take steps to making streets safer for people.

After that last paragraph, how do I even link to this story in Richmond Magazine by Rodrigo Arriaza about folks who’ve decided to switch from that car life to more active modes of transportation? Maybe my angle this morning is “Hey, quick reminder: We are out here! Please don’t kill us with your cars!” Also, and unrelated, I quibble with the framing of this article. Twice the author talks about how it’s well known that parking is hard to come by in Richmond. I dispute this! In fact, has any Richmonder ever in the history of Richmonders parked further than three blocks from their final destination?

Judging Mattingly at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has an update on the schools procurement process conversation. I’m still unconvinced this is actually a story. It was, however, an opportunity for Councilmembers Gray and Larson, Schoolboard Rep. Gibson, and a guy from the Virginia Contractor Procurement Alliance to hold a press conference on the steps of City Hall and rail on the Mayor’s administration. The Mayor had some thoughts of his own, and the Chair and Vice Chair of the School Board said, in a joint statement, “We want our students in state-of-the-art facilities as soon as possible, and believe that the construction approach that we have utilized has ultimately been in their best interest.” If I’m feeling cynical, maybe this is a story but one that is more about Election 2020 than anything else.

The RTD’s Gregory J. Gilligan says that Residence Inn plans to build a new extended-stay hotel at Floyd and Thompson. They’ll build a 193-space parking deck, too, but it’s crammed up against the highway in a kind of garbagey spot—just where parking decks belong, am I right?? I’ll tell you what, in just a couple of years, the western end of Carytown is going to look absolutely different.

I’ve been asleep at the wheel of The Boring Show, and I apologize! But, as of yesterday, there are two new NoBro public meetings for you to listen to: the October 19th Navy Hill Advisory Commission meeting and City Council’s 4th Navy Hill Development Proposal Work Session from October 28th. Set your podcast players to 2x and get ready to burn through almost five hours of audio.

This morning’s longread

Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.

People are still upset that Martin Scorsese said a bad thing about the Marvel movies, and, in this column, he tries to explain what he meant—and now people are mad about that, too! There is definitely some “old man yells at cloud” stuff in this piece (for example, he seems unaware of the thousands of blazingly talented young people making films on YouTube), but, on the whole I agree with him.

Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes. They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.

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