This drink goes down anything but easy.
An unknown artist created a series of at least four satirical postcards using old Kool-Aid ads to mock Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger and city councilors who are in favor of a zoning amendment that will allow developer Don Sinex to build up to 14 stories high.
“An appreciative City Council says … ‘Mayor knows best,’” reads the riff on a vintage advertisement. The original shows a family paying tribute to Mom, whose head in the edited version has been replaced by Weinberger’s. It reads: “He keeps Kool-Aid in the ice box by the pitcher full — and they’re drinking it!”
The altered ads were distributed at the South End Art Hop last weekend and were posted Sunday on the Facebook page belonging to the Stop the 14-Story Mall group. The post came one day before the council passed by a 7-4 vote the amendment that will allow the Burlington Town Center redevelopment to go forward. A public hearing and final vote on the proposal is scheduled for September 29.
“They were at Art Hop, but I don’t know who did it,” said Caryn Long, a member of the Coalition for a Livable City group, which has long opposed the Sinex proposal. “It wasn’t the coalition. I saw them; I thought they were cool and funny.”
Genese Grill, another Coalition for a Livable City member, told Seven Days by email that someone anonymously dropped off the artwork outside the door of the 8 Space Studio Collective on Howard Street.
The artistic expression, though, didn’t sit well with City Councilor Joan Shannon, who decried on Facebook the “baseless ridicule” of “people who step up to serve the City.”
Shannon, who supported the proposal at Monday’s meeting, is portrayed in one of the ads as a child, a bow in her hair, raising a glass of Kool-Aid toward “Mother” — Weinberger.
“That’s not a recipe for encouraging people to serve,” she wrote on Facebook in reply to the images. “That said, I do like my bow.”
In a phone call Thursday, Shannon admitted the images are pretty funny, but she stuck by her concern that such attacks could dissuade people from running for local political office.
“I don’t want Burlington politics to go the way national politics has gone — making a mockery of it,” she said. “That was my only concern.”
Weinberger was not a fan of the artwork. “I believe strongly in democratic debate,” he said in a statement emailed to Seven Days. “I don’t believe that the debate should devolve into misinformation and offensive personal attacks.”
Weinberger went on to decry an image of him pouring Kool-Aid into a glass held by the city council president. “I am particularly disappointed by this poster, which questions the motivations and character of one of our best public servants. Anyone who thinks the City Council president is blindly following my plan without good reason does not know Jane Knodell, and is ignoring her thoughtful work on this issue.”
Art Hop featured another redevelopment protest when members of the Coalition for a Livable City released a two-minute video, projected on the side of a South End building, that slammed the Sinex proposal and encouraged residents to demand a public referendum on the project.
“City Hall is pushing spot zoning,” the video warned, “bowing to Sinex’s demands. This whole process was rushed, and dissent was crushed. Without your help, we will lose our town.”
The Art Hop political protest pieces were in the same vein as those displayed at last year’s event, when a group of artists erected “Miroville,” a faux housing development and advertisement that mocked Weinberger’s proposal to allow new housing in the Pine Street Enterprise Zone. The group worried the proposal would gentrify the South End and force artists out of the area.
As the artistic display went up, Weinberger changed course and pulled his support of the housing plan.
The mayor’s office told Seven Days that the art installation was not directly responsible for Weinberger’s change of heart, which came after months of public objection to the housing plan.
Updated, September 16, 2016 to add the statement from the mayor’s office and clarify timing of Weinberger’s decision on South End housing.
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Change is inevitable, like death and taxes. Everyone knows this. Anyone who attempts to label someone “anti change”, is basically belittling them.
As we learned from the Urban Renewal programs of the 60s and 70s, change is not always positive. In fact, it can be very negative and damaging, and even destroy a community.
Seems to me the Church Street Marketplace is a very human-scale project. The three 14-story towers of the Sinex proposal are not. In fact, academic studies have shown that buildings taller than 3-4 stories make people feel claustrophobic and boxed in.
I remember when a lot of people were angry and vocal about change in Burlington – when Church Street was turned into a pedestrian mall, when City Market opened, when the bike path was built, and when the waterfront as we now know it was transformed. Seems to me that there were a lot of loud voices then too. Fortunately, enough people realized that a vibrant city is always going through changes, sometimes in ways that we’re not certain about.
Sinex (and everyone else that considers investing in Burlington, or really investing in Vermont) should take his money and go elsewhere and leave these “artists” (have you seen some of their grade school quality work?) and the rest of the hippy dippy, Sanders loving socialist wannabes to be the economic drive behind this ridiculous state. Maybe they can be the employment powerhouse by selling bad pottery, finger-paintings and macrame to unsuspecting tourists with no brains or taste. And lets not forget the herb and yoga places. They are certainly the answer for a state with a struggling economy!
But really, as for the rest of us, we’d kind of like a vibrant downtown that includes places to purchase clothing and housewares that don’t look like they came from a thrift store or a 1960s nightmare.
Joan Shannon was clueless and had the wool pulled over her eyes, and bow, during the Burlington Telecom Fleecing of the Taxpayers as well.
People have drunk the Kool-Aid alright, but it’s not who you think. It isn’t Miro and Joan. It’s the privileged, white, guilty, Massachusetts, protester-class, socialist-wannabe hippies. It is they, not Miro and Joan, who conform to the anti-everything orthodoxy. You get an email or a text alert that there’s a protest somewhere, about something, and you’re required to show up. It’s hip, it’s kool to be anti-development. It’s hip, it’s kool to protest. Especially when you’ve got nothing else to do.
Poor Miro and Joan. They’re so offended, and the First Amendment gives them that right. But if the artists of this city don’t tell them what people are really thinking, how will they ever know how unpopular they are becoming? Put something regarding this eyesore on the ballot in November and let the people speak. It may cause Miro and Joan to revisit their plans for future employment.
Perhaps the Mayor can simply label this art-work “hate speech” in order to completely shut down the entire conversation and bring the terms of debate back to within his acceptable agenda. If that doesn’t work, perhaps he should follow the lead from Washington, DC and label these uppity artists who won’t get with the program “terrorists.” Best not to bother with something as silly as “free speech” if the mayor finds it offensive.
I hope that any judge who may be asked to review the zoning change will see this for what it is: illegal spot zoning. Yes, the City of Burlington received the legal advice to expand the 14-story district to the various parking garages, etc. immediately around the tall-mall proposal as a legal defense against spot zoning. Any judge worth his or her salt will see right through that defense.
The Mayor and the majority councilors have some valid points about tax revenue and the vibrancy of our downtown. The time to make that argument is during a rewrite of the Comprehensive Plan. The citizens and taxpayers will either agree or not; and will have to live with the consequences, good and bad. If this particular project is so critical, the City Council needs to drop some of the public amenity demands so the developer can build it in compliance with the existing zoning maximum of 10 stories. Continuing the road they are on of jamming it through destroys the integrity of the process and undermines the credibility of all involved.
The Kool-Aid campaign is high quality, colorful, and engaging political satire in the best tradition of the genre. It is revelatory metaphor, not “baseless ridicule” as Joan Shannon suggests. There is nothing mean spirited or Trumpesque about it. Joan even remarks to her credit that she likes her bow. She has a sense of humor. Miro Weinberger is much further off base (not to mention humorless) in misrepresenting these bright and lively cards as “misinformation and offensive personal attacks.” This is nothing more than an attempt to smear those who disagree with him, to suggest that they are not nice or honest people. Now that is, in fact, a baseless attack. A more accurate characterization of the cards would be to say that they use pop culture images along with text germane to the political moment to elicit laughter that’s more than a joke, laughter that is a comedic instant laden with meaning.
The cards say in their funny way that there’s something wrong, something fishy, something that could only be Kool-Aid driven about putting major zoning changes on the fast track just to accommodate a single big development proposal.
There was a time when Joan Shannon would have called this entire project, and its process, “a complete Sham!”.
Those were Joan’s EXACT words, spoken publicly at a Council meeting, for the Westlake proposal, which was nearly the identical same developer-driven scenario 10 years ago.
She also argued courageously for more modest buildings during the Zoning Rewrite of 2006-2007, insisting at that time that going to 105′ and increasing from 8 to 10 stories was more than high enough for any building in the City.
Apparently, she now hasn’t only drunk the Kool-Aid, but is mixing it up for everyone else, and insisting that they gulp it down. Just who is this woman? It’s like we’re all in a real-life “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” horror movie. If I were her husband, I’d check the basement for an opened seed-pod.