Intimations of le printemps

¶ Matins: Finally, our tickets for Come Back, Little Sheba. Sooner or later, all the Off-Broadway supporting actors appear on Law & Order. In a twist, one of the Law & Order stars sppears on Broadway!

¶ Tierce: The lesson of 142,000 free parking passes: understanding the difference between a perquisite and a privilege.

¶ Sext: A new reader of Portico just wrote to me to comment on The Devils of Loudun, which is very nice indeed, but I mention it here because the writer happens to have a site that shares many of my ambitions, The Pequod.

¶ Vespers: At long last, a disgrace in the Bronx will be cleared up. The Bronx Borough Courthouse, a beaux-arts jewel that sits at the end of a long vista, will become a charter school in the fall. Read Timonthy Williams’s story in the Times, but be sure to click on the photo, the better to see the building and how it has been defaced over the years. 

Oremus…

§ Matins. That would be S Epatha Merkerson. I used to know her rank — chief, captain, suffragen bishop; something — but that was long ago.

We had subscription tickets that bore the legend “Biltmore Show 2,” but nothing for Come Back, Little Sheba. A call to MTC last week straightened things out. As usual, our seats are for the end of the run. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I tell myself that it’s a good thing (of course I do!), because the actors are beginning to realize that the show is not going to run forever, that, within a week or two, they’ll be free to do other things — and who doesn’t feel a pang of regret then? All of this is utter bosh, though, because actors on the New York stage are as professional as brain surgeons in the New York hospitals.

§ Tierce. Many of you, I know, roll your eyeballs whenever I declare that American government these days reminds me of, say, the juicier bits in Susan Reynolds’s Fiefs and Vassals, but if you think about the problem posed by William Neuman and Al Baker’s story, linked to above, you may stop rolling and start reading. In “Can’t Find a City Parking Spot? Here Are About 142,000 Reasons,” the Times reporters discuss the difficulty of (a) tracking down and (b) rescinding the plethora of passes that New York City alone has issued to various employees.

So: what’s the difference between a perk and a privilege? A perquisite would be a parking space in a purpose-built garage. Corporations hand these out routinely as a cost of doing business. Employees, and only employees, can park in corporate garages. Municipalities, however, are not obliged to build their own garages. Their right to exact fines for cars parked improperly on public streets gives them the automatic power to withhold fining certain improperly parked cars — ie, cars with parking passes on their dashboards. The recipients of these passes are thereby put on an unequal footing with everyone else with regard to a public resource. This is a privilege.

Privileges are much easier to award than perquisites, as medieval warlords discovered when they hit on the scheme of “paying” their supporters with the income of religious foundations. If you’re the big guy, you can take something that’s already there and commandeer it for someone else’s benefit. Eventually, of course, the practice gets completely out of hand, not least because there is no more tenacious special-interest group than the holders of a privilege.

In the short term, it costs a lot more to build garages for city employees. (We’ll let the question of whether they ought to be encouraged to drive to work pass for the moment; it’s a red herring here.) In the longer term — but since when did American government, any more than the feudal warlord worried about the coming summer’s campaign, worry about the longer term?

§ Sext. All I know at this early juncture is that the captain of the Pequod, so to speak, is British — and in fact I don’t even know that much. But do take a look! And prepare to read.

§ Vespers. I’ll never forget the one time I happened upon this building. I was avoiding highway traffic by taking Third Avenue up through, to me, utterly uncharted territory. Suddenly, there was this wonderful little palace, an all-too-genuine Sleeping Beauty.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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