beach birds with cameras

sprawl is bad for familiar strangers

Nothing mind-bending here, but a recent LA Times column by Gregory Rodriguez  (which has unfortunately fallen into some kind of archival black hole and rendered itself unlinkable) mentions Ray Oldenburg and his theory of Third Places, which Rodriguez fears will be the next victims of the tanking economy. The suburbs have already dealt a massive blow to this much more vibrant way of life, which is probably why the very thought of them sends deadening chills down the spines of most urbanites.

“In the absence of informal public life, living becomes more expensive. Where the means and facilities for relaxation and leisure are not publicly shared, they become the objects of private ownership and consumption.”

“What suburbia cries for are the means for people to gather easily, inexpensively, regularly, and pleasurably -- a ‘place on the corner,’ real life alternatives to television, easy escapes from the cabin fever of marriage and family life that do not necessitate getting into an automobile.”

“Most needed are those ‘third places’ which lend a public balance to the increased privatization of home life. Third places are nothing more than informal public gathering places. The phrase ‘third places’ derives from considering our homes to be the ‘first’ places in our lives, and our work places the ‘second.’”

"The character of a third place is determined most of all by its regular clientele and is marked by a playful mood, which contrasts with people's more serious involvement in other spheres. Though a radically different kind of setting for a home, the third place is remarkably similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends…They are the heart of a community's social vitality, the grassroots of democracy, but sadly, they constitute a diminishing aspect of the American social landscape."

stop me if you've heard this one before

Nothing like scooping the WSJ by, oh, 4 freakin years.

And yet, the Journal totally fails to grasp the current news hook on this dusty old story: How will the jesters fare in the court of Obama?

recent postsecret favorites

And yes, the last one totally made me cry.

wanderlust, awaken

I can't stop watching this. It's hypnotizing.

And it makes me want to sell off all my worldly possessions (again), pack a very small bag, and go hobo (again).

"he has the calm, smiling resignation of someone who has nowhere left to hide"

I'd never even heard of Max Mosley before running across this story at work.

There's something quite compelling about it—I can't get it out of my mind. Not the S&M angle so much as the intriguing tension between his personal attitude toward the scene and decision to spend a lifetime hiding his involvement from his family. That must have done his head in something fierce at times.

'ambient awareness'

Way too much in this epic NYT article about Facebook to parse right now—posting it more as a reminder to myself to come back and dissect it at some point.

mystery on fifth avenue

Elitist as hell, yes. But still, the Nancy Drew in me can only say: WANT!

But some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric Clough, whose ideas about space and domestic living derive more from Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino.

The apartment even comes with its own book, part of which is a fictional narrative that recalls “The Da Vinci Code” (without the funky religion or buckets of blood) and “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” the children’s classic by E. L. Konigsburg about a brother and a sister who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and discover — and solve — a mystery surrounding a Renaissance sculpture. It has its own soundtrack, too, with contributions by Kate Fenner, a young Canadian singer and songwriter with a lusty, alternative, Joni Mitchell-ish sound, with whom Mr. Clough fell in love during the project.

walk on the wild side

This prototype from RCA student Susanna Hertrich continues to tease my imagination months after first encountering it, though I don't entirely agree with her decision to conflate "wild" with "evil." Still, an interesting idea.

This project investigates the fear and pleasure of encountering one's "inner evil self".

The inner evil self calls you on the lone drive at night on the motorway, when the next bridge just seems perfect for you to crash...it suggests throwing yourself or a person nearby on the rail tracks just before the next train arrives...and in boring business meetings it keeps whispering in your ear suggesting all those totally inappropriate things you could be doing now...

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE invites you to catch a glimpse of that world and embrace your inner evil self.

Carry a device and receive an invite to walk on the wild side.
The device as such is symbolic and universal and it triggers totally different ideas of catastrophic scenarios for each person. The device runs in an unpredictable manner, which makes it impossible to prepare for your walk .

When the counter starts to run, you have about 30 seconds to decide whether to perform or not to perform a totally inappropriate and catastrophic action.

Just do it ?

how can you love a man you've never read?

Grant Morrison has been taunting me for years. I love everything about him, and yet I've never actually read a single word he's written. Now that thesis insanity is over I plan to make the time and pool the money to buy up an obscene amount of work and take a long hot Grant Morrison bath.

His plots, which often explore the darker sides of human nature, are quite convoluted -- the storyline often winds its way through several layers of reality and temporal distortion. Common themes include the nature of identity and the subconscious, the unchartable movement of secret societies, the conflict between control and rebellion, and the emotional states of paranoia and alienation ..

Apropos of Borges, the world of the Doom Patrol is filled with a host of surreal horrors: sinister cults that speak in anagrams, recursive books that are humans that are secrets, hungry paintings that hide different levels of reality, alien heresiarchs imagined into being by dying women, and even a fictional world -- Orqwith -- slowly absorbing the real world into itself, a very Tlönist concept, indeed! Even his villains are stamped with the unusual, from existential artists on a dada rampage, to ancient spirits displaced by metempsychosis, kept alive by the collective pain of a wall of pinned butterflies ...

sophie calle, fellow packrat of emotional ephemera

In her studio, housed in a converted steel factory in the south of Paris, Calle has many more grey plastic boxes stacked up against the wall, and each is full of material for a future project.

This resonates in a reassuring way as well:

"Maybe, as my friends point out, I was not suffering that much because I was still able to take a picture of the room - with the telephone and the bed - where it happened."

Via the Guardian.