I say “sorta” because although there really is a contest, the winning story won’t be posted to eBay. Why not? Because the Scottish Doll was thrown away, and therefore can’t be sold on eBay.
Read about the Scottish Doll’s fate here, and then post your 6-word story to the comments section of that post. (Not this one!) At some point soon, a winning story will be picked, and a prize will be awarded.
[Image: Photo by Lauren Greenfield for The New York Times].
There are two photo-essays circulating that benefit from juxtaposed browsing. On the one hand, you’ve got a series of images taken by Lauren Greenfield for The New York Times of Dubai in decline. This, of course, comes as Dubai’s debt obligations have become so unmanageable that the city-state is actually causing trembles in the entire global economy.
[Image: Ad hoc infrastructure: "A convoy of sewage trucks removing solid waste from the city center. The current sewer system cannot handle the demand." Photo by Lauren Greenfield for The New York Times].
Indeed, financial historians are living through an extraordinarily interesting time, I have to say; the complex instrumentation of money has never been so Baroque or histrionic. Calculations are made so fast now that the physical location of buildings, vis-a-vis the speed of the data signals they receive, can actually impact urban geography. Call it nanofinance. More to the point, earlier this week the Guardian had this to say:
It’s not just comparative religion, in other words, it’s comparative religious finance.
But view Greenfield’s images alongside an equally memorable group of photos, this time documenting drug wars in Rio de Janeiro, that future Olympic city plagued—like New York City—by the occasional blackout.
[Images: (top) "A BOPE unit, the elite special forces of the military police stands guard during the operation in Favela da Grota. BOPE is a small group of well-trained officers infamous for their brutality. They are renowned for not carrying handcuffs." (bottom) "A BOPE officer takes a defensive position to cover his unit as they pull out of the Grota slum." Photos by João Pina for the Guardian].
The article that accompanies these images is less compelling, even for its descriptions of “the favela—a mess of slapped-up houses of corrugated tin and unpainted brick, dreadlocked tangles of pilfered electrical wiring, and graffiti-covered walls and alleyways where little shops and rudimentary bars selling beer and cachaça jostled for space with storefront evangelical churches.”
But these contrasting images of cities gone wild—one lost in a kind of financial syncope, a rococo without reference to manageable interest or ground plane, the other made politically incomprehensible by the overlapping invisibilities of heavily armed, microsovereign warlords, whether under government control or not—show us global urbanism as it steps into a surprisingly dark maturity in this second decade of the 21st-century.
(Article about “Sukuk bonds” found via @nicolatwilley).
[Image: Christmas trees for sale outside St. Mark's Church in New York City; a video-still taken November 30th, 2009].
“The most surreal part of Christmas,” architect and blogger Sam Jacob wrote two years ago, “is the migratory forest that pops up all around us for three weeks.”
It’s an image that has stuck with me: Christmas and its ubiquitous tree treated as a kind of vernacular landscape practice—or folk forestry—more than a religious event with Rapturous implications.
“Perhaps Christmas trees are a ghostly return of the mysterious ancient forest,” Jacob suggests, “a rolling back of the mechanisms and constructs of civilisation that addresses the Big Bad Wolf or Little Red Riding Hood inside us all.”
Philip Kennicott says Black Friday marks its beginning:
A spectacle of commerce and crowds, consumerism and credit cards, a day structured like a poll (vote with your pocketbook) on the state of the American economy? Is Black Friday the perfect and most fabulously self-reflective, narcissistic American holiday we’ve invented? …
Christmas isn’t devolving from some Christian fantasy of love and regeneration. That ship has left the harbor. No, it’s evolving into the perfect, five-week spectacle of Americana, with all our best American gadgets and gizmos on display, with all of our basic habits of the heart–desire, acquisitiveness, competition–perfectly exercised. Black Friday is the first day of the American Saturnalia, a festival of capitalism and technology and American self-love all rolled into one.
It’s been a good long while since I’ve used this blogospace to talk about other blogs. I still read a lot of other people’s news in the form of twitter, facebook and yes, blogs. Rafe Colburn pointed me to something I never would have seen otherwise, a post on a NY Times sports blog where Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick talks about why he moved back to Indiana. Since I’m one of those lucky people who could probably live anywhere in the world, people sometimes ask me what I’m doing here. This guy’s answer resonated with me.
I’m really all Bay Area at this point. I’m loving it out there. In the course of this dinner, Tom tells me that he’s moving back to Detroit. I said, ‘That’s crazy, why are you doing that?’ He said: ‘If you can live anywhere in the world, you ought to live here, because it’s fantastic. It has all this natural beauty, and the weather is great. As a consequence, so many people who live here don’t have a reason to be somewhere else. They’re attracted by those thing as opposed to something else.’ He said, ‘I need to be someplace where there’s a sense of community because that’s what motivates me.’ That was an absolutely light-bulb moment for me. I said: ‘That’s me. That’s what motivates me.’ On a dime, I switched and said, ‘Where can I get involved in the community?’
It’s not so much that I think Randolph, Vermont is the only place for me, or that my family has been here for generations or whatever. It’s that I really like living in a small town, where I have a special job to do and where people still need to learn the sorts of things that I teach. And I like living in the woods and despite my grousing about the mice, I like living close, really close, to nature. I like having a short list of options even though I’m aware it’s a sort of artificial constriction of the whole list of what’s possible. There’s always the larger bloggy world when I need to go someplace I’ve never been before. Thanks, Rafe.
A famously off-color line by the Roman poet Catullus is, surprisingly, generating news in England. (A hedge-fund manager who has been accused of sexual harassment quoted the line in an email to a job applicant.)
In the Telegraph, Harry Mount (of “Amo, Amas, Amat and All That: How to Become a Latin Lover”) discusses the role half-remembered Latin phrases and allusions play in public discourse in the U.K., while Mary Beard (of Cambridge at the TLS) says there’s more to Catullus’s “complicated little poem” than that one obscene insult.
I don’t like to brag, but I have the best dreams about celebrities of anyone I know. Close friends know about my infamous Pamela Anderson dream of a few years ago (trust me, it was intense) … others have heard me talk about my recent Lil Wayne dream (yes, I was hanging out with Lil Wayne, yes it was great).
And now, I’m pleased to report a new addition to the canon: Last night’s amazing dream about Hollywood superstar Sharon Stone!!!
Okay, so in the dream I had just finished mowing the yard. Sharon Stone helped me carry the lawn mower into my parents’ basement in North Carolina. No biggie, right? Then … umm … not sure how to put this … but Sharon Stone and I started KISSING ON THE LIPS in my parents’ basement!
After a few moments of ECSTASY, she said something like, “This is why I like kissing– because it keeps changing. At first when you kissed me, I thought ‘he’s not a very good kisser,’ but your more recent kisses have been really good.” (This is after kissing for all of ten seconds!)
WTF and LOL, right? “Tell me how you really feel, Sharon!”
And by the way, in case Sharon googles herself and is reading this … she should know that in my dream, her skin was really sweaty and kind of splotchy, so yeah … might want to look into getting a new dream-stylist.
But overall, a pretty cool dream! I was stoked! Because: Sharon Stone, people! “That’s how I roll.” Now China’s all mad at me, I bet.
Artist Harrell Fletcher sent me this call for proposals for Open Engagement, a three-day conference at Portland State University (May 14-17, 2010), exploring the role of the artist in socially-engaged art.
Open Engagement is a three-day conference that is an initiative of the Portland State University Art and Social Practice concentration and co-sponsored by Pacific Northwest College of Art and Portland Community College. Directed by Jen Delos Reyes and Harrell Fletcher and planned in conjunction with the Portland State University MFA Monday Night Lecture Series, this conference features three nationally and internationally renowned artists: Mark Dion, Amy Franceschini (Futurefarmers) and Nils Norman. The conference will showcase work by Temporary Services, InCUBATE, and a new project by Mark Dion created in collaboration with the PSU Art and Social Practice concentration.
The artists involved in Open Engagement: Making Things, Making Things Better, Making Things Worse, challenge our traditional ideas of what art is and does. These artist’s projects mediate the contemporary frameworks of art as service, as social space, as activism, as interactions, and as relationships, and tackle subject matter ranging from urban planning, alternative pedagogy, play, fiction, sustainability, political conflict and the social role of the artist.
Can socially engaged art do more harm than good? Are there ethical responsibilities for social art? Does socially engaged art have to do civic or public good? Can there be transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art making that would contribute to issues such as urban planning and sustainability? As both urban planning and contemporary art imagine new worlds, how can art projects be seen as potential models for living?
When I moved to Los Angeles in 2002 I knew nearly nothing about the city and knew nearly no one except for a few friends from college. Roaming town alone, between the L.A. Times newsroom and my corporate apartment, I'd go see my homie Valmiki, Guatemalan American and L.A.-raised, and he'd take me to parties, parks, and places to eat. First in Northeast L.A., then in Boyle Heights and East L.A., then in Silver Lake and Echo Park and downtown.
Little by little, L.A. began to map itself for me.
The bridge, in some respects, between both my college experience in the Bay Area and my early experience in L.A. was the band Ozomatli. I saw them play at the Greek Theater on the Berkeley campus, where I first watched their traditional enter-from-the-audience exit-through-the-audience, a genuine gesture of solidarity, un-self-conscious and sincere. Valmiki and I then saw them about a year later at a community event in Boyle Heights, the downtown skyline rising elegantly against the sunset.
Among those folks, among those sounds, I remembering for the first time feeling ... at home.
On Sunday night when Ozomatli played at the FIL in Guadalajara, I felt an enormous wave of nostalgia for my L.A. days. I have to admit it: my heart ached a little. I know that in more cynical L.A. mindsets Ozomatli is seen as a self-repeating, or even a cliche, but one of the nice after-effects of moving to Mexico and living among "regular people" here is that you can get a refreshing new perspective on notions of community and justice.
Ozomatli as a collective of musicians are clearly committed to both.
Fifteen years later, they're still at it. That means something, beyond their ground-breaking and infections mix of musical genres. You could feel it in the sense of unity among the youth and families dancing last night. Ozo, I thought, are a true treasure of Southern California, and of the bridges possible between nations and borders.
* Previously, "Los Angeles: The future, today?" "The sounds of the barrio, from L.A. to India,"
Hey everybody, this week’s PUNCHLINE POLL is now up and awaiting your vote at True/Slant. This week’s joke is called “The Afghan Classroom.”
Please take a minute to read the joke and vote on your favorite punchline! Winning punchline advances to next week’s joke!
Polls close Thursday evening.
Many thanks from your humble servant,
David Rees
After several days of scrutinizing price data, it’s time to scrutinize the stories themselves. While Josh added “tags” in real time describing each object, lately we’ve decided it might be useful and interesting to add tags that describe narrative elements and tactics.
Here are some we’ve come up with — but what we really want is your suggestions. What other story/theme/style tags should we add? (Anything here you think we should delete?)
Adolescence, Anthropomorphism, Bad Parents, Bad Spouse/Partner, Celebrity, Christianity, Christmas, Contemptuous of Object, Dead Relative, Death, Exposition – Classification, Exposition – Descriptive, Exposition – Sequence, Family Secret, Father, First-Person Narrator – Crazy/Unreliable, First-Person Narrator – Pathetic/Loser, First-Person Narrator – Well-Adjusted, Funny, Grandmother, Historical, Judaism, Magical Power, Murder, Object is Alive, Object is Cursed, Politics, Purple Prose, Religion, Romance, Sex, Thievery/Theft/Stealing, Third-Person Limited Narrator, Third-Person Omniscient Narrator, Uncle, Unhappy Romance, Workplace.
LOL, this guy has mastered the subtle art of verbal diplomacy! Let’s drop him into the middle of delicate geopolitical negotiations and see what happens! “What kind of shitty name is Ashgabat?”
The Book Cover Archive Blog presents its choices for the best book covers of the ’00s (a winner for each year and a runner-up). It’s hard to top the design for Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” part of the Penguin Great Ideas series, designed by David Pearson and published in ’08.
No, I did not just randomly slap my hands against my computer keyboard … “Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov” is someone’s actual name … and that someone is the president of Turkmenistan!
Remember crazy ol’ Turkmenbashi, the “Daddy of Turkmenistan,” who re-named the months of the year after his family (true) and built a statue of himself that always rotates to face the sun (true) and all that stuff? Anyway, he died. And Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov has replaced him. Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov is not as harsh as Turkmenbashi, but he (Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov) still has some issues. Basically, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov has promised a bunch of human rights reforms (haven’t we all) but has been a bit slow in actually gittin-r-done.
On the other hand, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov recently met with Henry Kissinger at the Plaza Hotel! So maybe he’s serious about human rights after all, LOL!
In cleverly devising a way of dealing with the Duration Factor, Josh addressed the potential effect on prices of both increased demand (as more people learned about the project) and dwindling supply (as we ran out of objects). It’s assumed that this Duration Factor caused prices to drift upward over time.
But in a comment to that post, reader Mimi offers theory she dubs “the Metal Boot Peak Effect.” Basically it suggests that the auction for Metal Boot With Story By Bruce Sterling, for $86, was a kind of turning point for the project, sparking a “process of disinhibition” that set the stage for much higher peak prices than we’d seen in our first three weeks. “I think,” she concludes, “these post MBPE peaks may be skewing your week-to-week averages.”
Well, enough speculation! For starters, what was the overall price trend? Here’s one answer in the form of a chart showing the average (or more precisely, the arithmetic mean) price paid, by week. (More charts and analysis after the jump.)
Let’s just say the results here aren’t quite as clean as what a Wall Street chartist would prefer. It’s pretty spiky. On the one hand, you can look at the first three weeks vs. the final three weeks, and the general upward drift is there. On the other hand, it’s probably an oversimplification for us to imply that prices simply rose week after week, given the extreme highs and lows in between.
In fact, it looks as if we were on the verge of peaking a mere week after the Metal Boot auction, when prices declined in Weeks 6 and 7 after a Week-5 high. Then weeks 8 and 9 were gangbusters — but week 10 saw a drop to one of the lowest averages of the entire project!
Week 10 was roughly our halfway point. Interestingly, it looks to me like that low point was followed by a relatively orderly rise. (The slip on Week 19 is a complete mystery to me)
Two questions: Does the actual time of year make any difference here? And: Would the results look similar if we used median (middle value), rather than mean (average), weekly sales figures.
Here you go:
By and large the average and middle value mostly correlate. The biggest disparity is in fact in Week 4 — Metal Boot week! The average price that week was $42.66, whereas the median was $17.82. The unusually high price for the Boot is part of the issue — but only part, since Sheila Heti’s Porcelain Shoe story also went for an unusually $77.51 that same week (in an auction that actually closed before the Boot.) Possibly, then, the unusually high average for that week is explained by the convergence of determined buyers not just on one object, but two that happened to go on sale days apart. Barefoot Buyer Syndrome, anyone?
Second, the time of year issue: I’ve listed the dates of the weeks that objects went on auction — meaning the sales closed the following week. So Week 7, one of our low points, was made up of auctions closing the last week of August. A time when lots of folks are away? We’ve speculated about that in the past. But Week 10 looks even worse on this chart, and those auctions would have closed in the latter half of September. So maybe time of year is a non-factor.
Mimi’s point about the MBPE got me curious about weekly high prices. I remember when I really didn’t think anybody would beat the $36.88 paid for Necking Team Button with Story by Susannah Breslin, from Week 1. (It’s easy to forget, but we really didn’t know how any of this was going to turn out; we were thrilled to get prices in excess of $20 back then, given what we were selling.)
This chart reminded that Duck Tray With Story By Stewart O’Nan, from Week 3, actually preceded both the Metal Boot and the Porcelain shoe as the object to break the Necking Team Button record, and moving us into a whole other realm of prices, selling for $71. Even so, my read is that I don’t think the high auctions for the Boot, the Duck Tray, or the Porcelain Shoe, were game-changers for the entire project. Subsequent results just seem to have too many choppy moments.
I do think it’s probably fair, as Mimi suggests, that some of the very earliest Significant Objects were, in effect, undervalued. I suspect this is partly because of the Duration Factor addressed by Josh, but also because in the early days we not only had a smaller audience and more objects to go around (the first week in particular, we put a whopping 13 items and stories on sale, in an effort to give readers a lot to sink their teeth into right from the start), we were also basically unproven. That first month was in a way one long proof of concept to readers and potential buyers. Who knew if we were really going to pull this crazy idea off, anyway? Who knew if anybody would buy anything? By the time the Metal Boot went on sale, I think we’d answered those questions.
Beyond that, I think these charts leave a lot of open questions, and suggest that maybe weekly averages don’t tell us enough. Stay tuned.
Turkmenistan is a country in Central Asia. They have lots of gas. Europe wants the gas to heat its bistros and cafes and tapas bars and whatnot. But Turkmenistan is a leeetle bit sketchy.
Ladies and gentlemen, do we have a moral dilemma on our hands???
Short doc on the protests in California.
Dear Comrades,
Next week, I’m going to be doing my third Art Basel. Besides showing in 3 exhibits, I’ll be doing a live painting and organizing a glamorous, quasi-legal burlesque flashmob. Hope to see you!
–
THE DR. SKETCHY’S ART BASEL FLASHMOB OF GLORY
You are cordially invited
to…
an absolutely illegal, stunningly glamorous, guerilla edition
of…
Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School
during Art Basel
Saturday, December 5th
8 pm
South Beach
Details below…
Dr. Sketchy’s is an international art cult. In over a hundred cities around the globe (including New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, and Sao Paulo) artists gather in bars to sketch beautiful, depraved models in an atmosphere of boozy camaraderie. Founded by artist Molly Crabapple in 2005, Dr. Sketchy’s has received rave reviews in the New York Times, and taken place at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, with plans in December to bring it to the Museum of Modern Art. You can learn more at www.mollycrabapple.com.
Now, it’s laying siege to Art Basel.
On December 5th, Dr. Sketchy’s will be staging a guerilla live-drawing insurrection in South Beach. At exactly 8pm, a limo will disgorge a cavalcade of depraved performers- burlesque queens, dominatrixes, midgets- on the streets for you to draw.
You will be provided with free sketchpads from Whitelines paper.
At 8:30, your models will vanish.
The location will be announced on twitter (@mollycrabapple) on the morning of the 5th.
Look for the girl in the purple kimono.
Please pass this note to anyone you think might like it.
—–
MULTIVERSAL
Art Basel Miami Beach is the most important art show in the United States - a cultural and social highlight for the Americas. As the sister event of Switzerland’s Art Basel, it is the most prestigious art show worldwide for the past 40 years. In that spirit, for the duration of Art Basel, WST Worldwide & Kazilla Productions will be hosting the Multiversal group show - a unique series of exhibitions showcasing the works of many talented artists from around the world.
Multiversal is the brainchild of graphic artist and Wizard Sleeve Toys founder, Mike Franco and rising star Cassie “Kazilla” Williams. Multiversal will occupy several rooms including a South Florida local artist room, an Art Institute student exhibition, the second Feminality art show (www.FeminalityArtShow.com), a custom toy show and several exhibitions and installations. Full details and itinerary to follow.
For the launch of Multiversal, Franco was determined to have Tara McPherson and Buff Monster collaborate on a huge painting. “Once I had Tara on board, I contacted Buff Monster and he was honored to be a part of the show.”
A true mix of art on a variety of platforms, Multiversal will feature more than 150 top artists from the likes of Buff Monster, Sket-One, Mear One, Kano, Georgette Pressler (body art), Tara Hauck (fine art photography), as well as Aunia Kahn, Tofusquirrel and Jessica Sardas amongst others. We will be teaming up with 3 other galleries; The Hive Gallery from LA, The Steve Brown Gallery from Cleveland and the D.E.A.D. Gallery from Belgium.
The Multiversal group show begins on Thursday, December 3rd and runs until Sunday, December 6th. It will take place at The American Legion building, 6445 NE 7th Ave in the Miami Modern District. Admission is FREE. McPherson and several other artists will be on-hand for the event.
Part of the exhibition proceeds will benefit HandsUpNotHandouts.org.
——-
ART WHINO: MIAMI
An innovative New Brow exhibition, complete with receptions and musical performances that will heighten the experience beyond the typical art show.
Art from two separate traveling exhibitions, LIFE ESSENTIALS and OLD SKOOLIN’ will be brought together in Miami for the first time.
This landmark multi-city, comprehensive exhibition will bring together the best of both traditionally trained and urban street art styles, helping to more define this era in contemporary art and set the bar even higher for the direction of art today.
This combined show will highlight both music and art that spans the spectrum of current trends, and will be accompanied by installations and auxiliary exhibitions featuring live painting by several Art Whino artists.
Art Whino has also teamed up with Urbanite Bistro to host a special all day event Thursday, December 3rd in the outdoor garden space of Urbanite Bistro, featuring over 15 Art Whino artists painting live and musical performances. Artists will also showcase some of their newest works inside the restaurant for the entire of the month of December.
Main Exhibit
Charcoal Studios
Across from the Street From Scope
2135 NW 1st AVE
Miami, FL 33127
2nd Location
Urbanite Bistro
One block from Pulse
62 NE 14th Street
Miami, FL 33132
Outdoor Live Painting and Music
Noon-8pm
Reception/After Party
11pm-2am
Thursday Dec 3rd
Charcoal Studios
Art Whino: MIAMI
General Admission
11am-8pm
—
AE DISTRICT (MIAMI, FL), EASTERN DISTRICT (BROOKLYN, NY) AND AD HOC ART (BROOKLYN, NY) TEAM UP TO BRING THE BEST OF BROOKLYN TO THE HEART OF MIAMI DESIGN DISTRICT
December 3, 2009 at 7PM -Opening Night Reception with Artists
Complimentary Beverages provided by Amstel Light
Miami, FL – In an era where being from just “the City” doesn’t cut it, Brooklyn, New York has quickly become the newest epicenter for emerging arts and culture for not only the five boroughs but rather for the global audience. And as the international art world descends on Miami for Art Basel Miami Beach, the best of what Brooklyn has to offer will collectively congregate in the heart of the Miami Design District.
Miami-based conceptual gallery AE District is proud to partner with Brooklyn-based galleries Eastern District and Ad Hoc to bring you over 40 artists ranging from all mediums and styles that best represent the aesthetics and vision of the Brooklyn art scene.
With Miami serving as the perfect backdrop for this diverse group of artistry, BKMIA shines the spotlight on the unique alliance between the two cities as well as showcase the similarities of both cultures in relations to the contemporary art world.
Gallery Hours during Art Basel Miami Beach:
December 3, 2009 | 12PM to 5PM
Opening Night Party 7PM – 11PM with special performances TBA
December 4, 2009 | 11AM to 7PM
December 5, 2009 | 11AM to 7PM
December 6, 2009 | 11AM to 5PM
Closing Night Party 7PM – 11PM with special performances TBA
BKMIA | 4040 NE 2nd Avenue, Suite 103 | Moore Building | Miami, FL 33137
For more on BKMIA, visit http://www.BKMIA.COM
As happy as I am to see Read Write Web cover the awesome Playgrub, I have to correct the claim that I was a creator of Playdar along with RJ. I am contributing, but at nowhere near the level of James Wheare, Max Howell and many others. My important contributions were to Playdar’s predecessor XSPF.
So far NY has said nix to frost so the tomatoes, blessem, are still growing. Not tasty anymore but as beautiful as any well-cared for parkinglot (have you seen A Serious Man?). Pictured here is a white yellow variety that in the flanken of summer was as delicious as the true fruit each of us was promised upon Edenic arrival, and behind it a little “sweet million” cherry tomato.
There are many kinds of people in the world, but I am not one of them.
Coming up on December 9, Storefront for Art and Architecture will be celebrating 27 years’ worth of newsprint newsletters with the publication of a massive two-volume collection, no fewer than 1000 pages in length, called Storefront Newsprints 1982-2009.
There will be a free public event on December 9, at which many of these architects, artists, writers, and curators will be present, and the book starts shipping the next day.
You can read more about the event, and order a copy of the new 7lb. publication, on Storefront’s website.
It’s been a fantastic holiday week for The BLDGBLOG Book. I was thrilled to see, for instance, that the Wall Street Journal chose the book—amidst only 36 books—for their 2009 “Holiday Book Guide.” For good or for bad, The BLDGBLOG Book pops up as one of six titles that the newspaper specifically recommends for “a young artist who enjoys science fiction and high brow fantasy” (!), alongside books by Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, Jeff VanderMeer, R. Crumb, and Geoff Dyer. So thanks, Wall Street Journal! That was genuinely awesome news.
Check out the rest of their picks here.
However, Planetizen also picked up on the book for their list of the Top 10 Books to read in 2010. “The Planetizen editorial staff based its 2010 edition list on a number of criteria,” we read, “including editorial reviews, popularity, Planetizen reader nominations, number of references, sales figures, recommendations from experts and the book’s potential impact on the urban planning, development and design professions.” Again, it’s great company to be in, including David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries, Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta, Green Metropolis by David Owen, Paul Goldberger’s Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture, and many more—including Planetizen’s “Other Noteworthy Titles,” where we find Kazys Varnelis’s Infrastructural City.
Planetizen itself is also an extremely useful and interesting website in its own right, with a strong editorial team, so definitely spend some time clicking around there in the new year.
In any case, it’s more than obvious that not everyone thinks the book—or this website—deserves these sorts of appearances, but I’m still excited to see it popping up out there in the world. Go, little book, go!
And, to be honest, whether or not you like the topics I cover here, to see a book about architecture in something like the Wall Street Journal‘s top 36 picks for the entire year should be good news for anyone who thinks that people don’t want to read about the built environment. There is an intense and very widespread interest in architecture out there, and so I’m very happy to see that audience being recognized.
You can never get good pizza in the airport, or deli, or burritos, or Chinese. But I just ate yet another satisfying airport meat-and-two-sides, this one at the Speedway Grill in Charlotte-Douglas, where we’re paused on our long way home from Thanksgiving. It was good enough that CJ, to my great surprise, demanded more than his share of green beans; and it was only the second best airport BBQ I’ve had this month. (Brookwood Farms BBQ in Raleigh-Durham takes the crown here.)
Why does barbecue translate so well to the airport setting?
Marcel Duchamp: Etant donnes by Michael R. Taylor
I did manage to not buy anything yesterday, but that’s partly because Jim paid my way into the JFK Library/Museum [by previous arrangement, that's my idea of a nice date] and paid for some gas. I looked at my credit card statement to pay it off today and realized it had paid bills in my absence [a few bucks to ebay, a charge from a few days ago that cleared yesterday] and that really it’s pretty tough to have a day that doesn’t involve spending any money even though I don’t spend money all the time.
Sometimes I feel like I’m evading imagined pursuers in the ways I travel and make plans. I was away for a week this time and had a really stupidly good time considering how many things I did and people I saw. I also think I didn’t get sick. I’m home eating heirloom apples feeling the wind leaking into the cracks in the house and am happy to be here. Here’s a bulleted list of the holiday week.
Woke up today and it was sunny and windy outside and I’ve got a whole weekend at home alone for only the second time since August.
Prominent on my list of storytelling pet peeves is the Reasonless Revelation: wherein characters, unbidden or with only the slightest hint of prompting, share highly intimate details about their lives. It’s not credible! No one does that! I have been known to rant.
So today we’re in the airport waiting for our flight home, and a diffident soldier, foot in a cast, approaches. We offer him our seats, but he doesn’t need to sit down. He’d like to use one of our phones to call his wife.
As we fumble in our bags, he talks. It’s been, he guesses, the worst and best week of his life. He just had this surgery, paid for by the U.S. government thank you very much, for the plantar fasciitis that he got when the Army switched to suede boots. Didn’t look like much on the outside, just a little lump on the heel, but you step on a stone or a pecan (he emphasized the first syllable) and it’s so painful.
Yeah, it’d been bad. He’s just been realizing how much the PTSD and depression was affecting him. In fact he had an attempted suicide situation, and he was in a treatment facility for five days and they put him on antidepressants, he can’t believe the difference. He’s really glad we’re going to let him use the phone, it means a lot to make this call to his wife. Well, fiance, actually — they’ve been together five years, they have a three year old. When he had that mental breakdown, well, there was a gun involved, and the sheriff wanted to know if she wanted to press charges for attempted murder and aggravated assault, and she said Hell no! He had to go, though, they were living in a house her parents owned and her parents aren’t really supportive. He wants to get out of the Army. He’s gonna move back in with his parents, find a job doing something calm. Peaceful.
All this in about ten minutes.
Steve locates his phone and hands it over. The call is short, with a lot of I love yous. Then they’re calling us to board. He’s in first class. Gotta use those benefits while he’s got ‘em, he figures.
A short while later, we walk past him on the way to our non-first-class seats. He’s talking to his seatmate, and we can’t help but wonder if he’ll tell the whole story again.
Shorpy is a great source for old photographs. They often get them from sources like the Library of Congress which is where this photo of the New Cannan public library in 1953 came from. You can also see the original set of photos over at the Library of Congress [did not see this one over at their Flickr photostream]. The big add that Shorpy’s has, however, is the community. It’s not just a photo of a library, it’s also people commenting about their memories of the library including where else they’ve seen that certain floor tile [fun fact: it's also the tile that's in my bathroom as near as I can tell] [thanks mike]
We’re having fun geeking out over the quantitative aspects of Significant Object’s experimental phase, and this coming week we’ll offer more tables and charts and graphs. We’ll also kick off the qualitative analysis (i.e., analyzing the stories’ style, mood, voice, and so forth) soon.
At the same time, we’re assigning and editing stories for Significant Objects v2: the charitable fund-raising project. We’ve assigned nearly 20 objects so far, and we’ve got lots of terrific stories — from previous contributors, and new ones, too — in the pipeline.
Also, we’ve settled on a writing-oriented recipient for SO v2’s proceeds! It’s 826 National, a group of seven nonprofit organizations (in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Ann Arbor, and Boston) dedicated to helping students, ages 6-18, with expository and creative writing. Many thanks, in advance, to our contributing writers for their generosity in supporting this good cause. And we encourage bidders to throw caution to the winds, this time around (and from now on).
To be determined: We’re not sure how many significant objects we’ll auction off during the course of SO v2, but we’re tentatively thinking 50. NB: We’ll redirect a small percentage of the eBay auction sales to cover our costs, including a (very) part-time assistant who will help us out with some of the “back end” aspects of Significant Objects v2. Significant Objects’ co-curators, Rob Walker and Josh Glenn, won’t be paid for their work. Once v2 is over, we’ll make a full report.
More fun with SO v1’s data is on the way, this week, and Significant Objects v2 will get going soon. Stay tuned!
Aside from my teaching, I had for some years been engaged in various anthropological projects with the primary ambition of articulating the significance of the clown figure in diverse cultural contexts. I was interested in original sin and had dabbled in esoteric philosophy; my remote ancestors had been Salem witches. I owed the formation of my character chiefly to accident. I shall not pretend to determine in what degree I was credulous or superstitious. I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself.* --from my cento review of American Fantastic Tales (ed. Peter Straub), in the L.A. Times.
* Photo above, "Madonna in Progress," via East of West L.A.
I travel on Saturday to Guadalajara, where the big International Book Fair opens with a special guest of honor this year, the city of Los Angeles. From the fair's official site:
A natural bridge between Mexican and American culture, Los Angeles is also a city that has been able to acquire a unique identity relating to cultural production, the trademark that distinguishes its delegation, comprised of around 50 authors, 20 academics, 14 artists and theater companies. The program also includes 7 visual arts exhibitions and a film series presenting classic and contemporary films designed to showcase the diverse perspectives on its urban landscape, its culture and people.
True enough, there's going to be so much going on I won't know where to begin.
Both "Phantom Sightings" and "Vexing" are on view at Guadalajara museums. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will be in town, and so will L.A. Weekly food critic Jonathan Gold, and the Zócalo crew. One panel will have Gregory Rodriguez moderating the question of how Mexican Americans see Mexico.
The Jalisco edition of La Jornada breaks down the Encuentro Chicano, an ambitious two-day program that focuses on Mexican American arts and letters, organized by the Centro Universitario de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades at the University of Guadalajara. I am excited to be moderating a panel with Luis Rodriguez, Maria Amparo Escandon, Jose Luis Valenzuela, and Ruben Martinez. Come check it out if you're in town.
Here is a blog that artist Daniel Gonzalez is running right now from the festivities. So far Daniel has posted on the Hospicio Cabañas, Mixtecas drawing on Converse sneakers, installing the "Vexing" show, and more.
Finally, here is an essay I published on Sunday in the culture section of El Páis, Spain's biggest newspaper. In it, I discuss the radical recent changes to the "vaguely Mexican atmosphere" of Los Angeles, and where us 'post-Chicanos' stand today. I'll have an English translation link to the piece later today.
* Intersections returns on December 3.
[Image: The Georgian cave monastery of Vardzia, via Wikipedia].
Vardzia is a ruined honeycomb of arched passageways and artificially enlarged caves on a steep mountainside in Georgia. It is on a “tentative list” for UNESCO World Heritage status.
[Image: Vardzia, via Wikipedia].
Quoting from Wikipedia:
Nearby are the ruins of another cave monastery, called Vanis Kvabebi.
[Images: Vardzia, via Wikipedia].
In the formal application sent to UNESCO for consideration of the site, we read that the architecture of this region can be seen as spatially punctuating the landscape, supplying moments of almost grammatical emphasis:
Originally constructed in the 12th century—in a region inhabited by humans since at least neolithic times—and very much resembling one of the cave-cities of Cappadocia, Vardzia is a spatially fantastic site (and, I’d assume, a videogame level waiting to happen).
[Images: Vardzia, via Wikipedia].
It is also located in one of the most geologically interesting places on earth—at least from a subterranean standpoint—as the nation of Georgia also contains the world’s deepest known cave.
As National Geographic explained in an article several years ago, Krubera Cave—also known as Voronya—is still incompletely explored, despite its record-breaking, abyssal depths; expeditions have spent more than three weeks underground there, mapping windows and chambers, sleeping in tents, and using colored dyes to trace rivers and streams locked in the rock walls around them.
Check out this sequence of images, for instance, documenting an organized descent into the planet—or this article about caving in Abkhazia, or even this summary of the “Call of the Abyss” exploration project that sought to find the true depths of Voronya Cave.
[Images: Vardzia, as seen in some stunning photos by cosh_to_jest].
In any case, there’s absolutely no geological connection between Vardzia and Krubera Cave—there is no secret tunnel system linking the two across the vast Georgian landscape (after all, they are extremely far apart)—but how exciting would it be to discover that Vardzia had, in fact, been constructed as a kind of architectural filter above the stovepipe-like opening of a titanic cave system, and that, 800 years ago, monks alone in the mountains reading books about the end of the world might have sat there, surrounded by fading frescoes of saints and dragons, looking into the mouth of the abyss, perhaps even in their own local twist on millennial Christianity standing guard over something they believed to be hiding far below.
[Images: Vardzia, via Wikipedia].
In fact, I don’t mean to belabor the point here, but I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that the CIA has satellite photos that have been used as scouting documents for the rumored location of Noah’s Ark—it is “satellite archaeology,” one researcher claims. That is, there being quite a few religious members of the U.S. government, things like Noah’s Ark are considered more objective and archaeological than they are superstitious or theological.
But how absolutely mind-boggling would it be to find out someday that there is, operating within the U.S. intelligence services, a small group of especially religious analysts who have been scouring the Caucausus region, funded by tax dollars, and armed with geoscanning equipment and several miles of rope, looking for the entrance to Hell?
You can see further images of Vardzia here.
Some of you have speculated that the Significant Object experiment’s duration affected sales prices — that is, you’ve speculated that objects auctioned off in the experiment’s first weeks no doubt sold for less, on average, than did objects auctioned off in its final weeks. (The experiment lasted for 19 weeks.) As word of the project spread, opportunities to purchase one of only 100 total objects decreased, and competition thus grew fiercer.
A quick glance at the Final Price, Week by Week table suggests that there probably is a Duration Factor along the lines suggested above. For example, as you can see in the chart excerpt reproduced below, none of the objects sold in Weeks 1 and 2 were ranked above #35/100, and the majority of them ranked in the bottom quartile.
Objects sold in Weeks 18 and 19, on the other hand, tended to rank in the top half of the results, and a couple of the objects are in our Top Ten.
Therefore, before drawing conclusions about what sorts of stories tend to make objects more or less significant, we ought to control for the Duration Factor. But how to proceed?
I thought of a formula: A – (B/C) = D, wherein:
A = The average final price of objects sold in the project’s 19th and final week, $36.83.
B = A particular week’s final sales total
C = The number of items sold that week (so B/C = the week’s average final price)
D = The amount to be added to any object sold that week, to correct for the Duration Factor.
For Week 1, for example, B = $247.30, and C = 13, so B/C = $19.02. Subtract that from A ($36.83) and you arrive at $17.81. Now add $17.81 to the final price of any object from Week 1. The Smiling Mug went for $32.08, for instance; now it would have adjusted final price of $49.89. Add $17.81 to each object from Week 1, add those adjusted totals together and divide by 13 again… and voila! Same average final price as Week 19. Duration Factor: neutralized.
Of course, we’d have to run these numbers on all our objects before determining whether the Smiley Mug’s ranking had increased or decreased relative to other objects as a result of this procedure. But before I started doing any of this math, I realized that some weeks might have an average final price that’s higher than Week 19’s $36.83. The answer for D in the equation above could be a negative number, meaning we might have to subtract some amount from every object sold during a certain week. But doing so doesn’t make sense, if we’re trying to control for the Duration Factor, which is predicated on the assumption that average final sales totals in general should rise, week by week.
So now what? Keep reading!
The fact that the difference between Week 1 and Week 19’s average final prices is almost exactly $18.00 (as noted above) struck me as propitious. What if we added $18.00 to the final sale price of each item in Week 1, $17.00 to the final sale price of each item in Week 2, and so forth through Week 18 ($1.00 added)? Week 19 sales prices, obviously, would not get adjusted. This would neutralize the Duration Factor without requiring us to subtract from the sale prices of any objects sold during weeks whose average total sales happen to be higher than Week 19’s. The Smiling Mug would go from $32.08 to $50.08, in this scenario. Compare that to, say the Ocean Scene Globe, whose unadjusted final ranking ($33.00) was slightly higher the Smiling Mug’s. After this Duration-adjustment, its price goes up, but only to $39.00, because it was sold much later, during Week 13. Under Duration-corrected figures, then, the Smiling Mug ranks higher than the Ocean Scene Globe — in fact, when you look at the new chart, you’ll see that the Smiling Mug is now 16 places above the Ocean Scene Globe. So correcting for Duration Factor can make quite a difference. But will it change our Top Ten list? Will it affect the Bottom Ten? Let’s find out.
Following the procedure outlined in the previous paragraph, I’ve gone ahead and adjusted final prices for our 100 objects. After the jump, you’ll find a table displaying the following: Week, Object, Final Price, and Adjusted Price. I’m eager to hear your analysis of this data. Please publish your comments at the end of this post.
ALL TABLES
1. Original and Final Price (plus Author & Sales Rank)
2. Final Price, Week by Week (plus Author & Sales Rank, minus Original Price)
3. Final and Adjusted Price, Week by Week (minus Author & Original Price)
| Sales Rank | Object | Final Price | Adjusted Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week 08 | 1 | Russian Figure | $193.50 | $204.50 |
| Week 15 | 2 | Indian Maiden | $157.50 | $161.50 |
| Week 17 | 3 | Wooden Animal | $108.50 | $110.50 |
| Week 18 | 4 | Pink Horse | $104.50 | $105.50 |
| Week 13 | 5 | “Hawk” Ashtray | $101.00 | $107.00 |
| Week 08 | 6 | 4-Tile | $88.00 | $99.00 |
| Week 04 | 7 | Metal Boot | $86.00 | $101.00 |
| Week 04 | 8 | Cape Cod Shoe | $77.51 | $92.51 |
| Week 15 | 9 | Fish Spoons | $76.00 | $80.00 |
| Week 16 | 9 | Fake Banana | $76.00 | $79.00 |
| Week 19 | 9 | Missouri Shotglass | $76.00 | $76.00 |
| Week 03 | 12 | Duck Tray | $71.00 | $87.00 |
| Week 08 | 12 | Mallet | $71.00 | $82.00 |
| Week 05 | 14 | Cow Vase | $62.00 | $76.00 |
| Week 18 | 14 | Felt Mouse | $62.00 | $63.00 |
| Week 09 | 16 | Sand Animal | $57.66 | $67.66 |
| Week 06 | 17 | Rhino Figurine | $57.00 | $70.00 |
| Week 05 | 18 | Kneeling Man Figurine | $56.50 | $70.50 |
| Week 19 | 19 | Geisha Bobblehead | $56.00 | $56.00 |
| Week 17 | 20 | BBQ Sauce Jar | $54.00 | $56.00 |
| Week 09 | 21 | Bird Figurine | $52.00 | $62.00 |
| Week 18 | 22 | Rooster Oven Mitt | $51.99 | $52.99 |
| Week 05 | 23 | Meat Thermometer | $51.00 | $65.00 |
| Week 05 | 23 | Idol | $51.00 | $65.00 |
| Week 09 | 25 | Ziggy Heart | $50.00 | $60.00 |
| Week 18 | 25 | Jar of Marbles | $50.00 | $51.00 |
| Week 12 | 27 | Motel Room Key | $45.01 | $52.01 |
| Week 13 | 28 | Statute Dish | $42.00 | $48.00 |
| Week 05 | 29 | Ireland Cow Plate | $41.00 | $55.00 |
| Week 06 | 29 | Rope/Wood Monkey Figurine | $41.00 | $54.00 |
| Week 18 | 29 | Amoco Yo-Yo | $41.00 | $42.00 |
| Week 14 | 32 | Mr. Pickwick Coat Hook | $38.00 | $43.00 |
| Week 07 | 33 | Marines (Upside-Down) Logo Mug | $37.00 | $49.00 |
| Week 16 | 33 | Alien Toy | $37.00 | $40.00 |
| Week 01 | 35 | Necking Team Button | $36.88 | $54.88 |
| Week 10 | 36 | Seahorse Lighter | $36.00 | $45.00 |
| Week 11 | 36 | Hand-Held Bubble Blower | $36.00 | $44.00 |
| Week 11 | 38 | Round Box | $35.00 | $43.00 |
| Week 12 | 39 | Cigarette Case | $33.77 | $40.77 |
| Week 13 | 40 | Ocean Scene Globe | $33.00 | $39.00 |
| Week 01 | 41 | Smiley Mug | $32.08 | $50.08 |
| Week 02 | 42 | Halston Mug | $31.00 | $48.00 |
| Week 09 | 42 | Penguin Creamer | $31.00 | $41.00 |
| Week 15 | 42 | Windsurfing Trophy/Statue | $31.00 | $35.00 |
| Week 13 | 45 | Crumb Sweeper | $30.99 | $36.99 |
| Week 19 | 46 | Blue Vase | $30.00 | $30.00 |
| Week 19 | 47 | Lighter Shaped Like Small Pool Ball | $27.00 | $27.00 |
| Week 01 | 48 | JFK Bust | $26.00 | $44.00 |
| Week 01 | 48 | Creamer Cow | $26.00 | $44.00 |
| Week 06 | 48 | Unicorn | $26.00 | $39.00 |
| Week 09 | 48 | Praying Hands | $26.00 | $36.00 |
| Week 16 | 48 | Dilbert Stress Toy | $26.00 | $29.00 |
| Week 17 | 53 | Cracker Barrel Ornament | $24.50 | $26.50 |
| Week 07 | 54 | Elvis Chocolate Tin | $24.00 | $36.00 |
| Week 01 | 55 | Miniature Bottle | $23.00 | $41.00 |
| Week 01 | 56 | Chili Cat Figurine | $22.72 | $40.72 |
| Week 17 | 57 | Flip-Flop Frame | $21.80 | $23.80 |
| Week 11 | 58 | Military Figure | $21.50 | $29.50 |
| Week 12 | 58 | Choirboy Figurine | $21.50 | $28.50 |
| Week 14 | 58 | Sea Captain Pipe Rest | $21.50 | $26.50 |
| Week 19 | 58 | Umbrella Trinket | $21.50 | $21.50 |
| Week 06 | 62 | PBR Opener | $20.51 | $33.51 |
| Week 08 | 63 | Grain Thing | $20.50 | $31.50 |
| Week 11 | 63 | Uncola Glass | $20.50 | $28.50 |
| Week 13 | 63 | Ornamental Sphere | $20.50 | $26.50 |
| Week 14 | 63 | Wave Box | $20.50 | $25.50 |
| Week 03 | 67 | Tin Ark | $19.50 | $35.50 |
| Week 15 | 67 | Thai Hooks | $19.50 | $23.50 |
| Week 04 | 69 | Foppish Figurine | $17.82 | $32.82 |
| Week 01 | 70 | Sanka Ashtray | $17.79 | $35.79 |
| Week 03 | 71 | Spotted Dogs Figurine | $17.50 | $33.50 |
| Week 10 | 72 | Cat Mug | $17.00 | $26.00 |
| Week 04 | 73 | Dome Doll | $16.49 | $31.49 |
| Week 17 | 74 | Swiss Medal | $16.00 | $18.00 |
| Week 12 | 75 | Duck Vase | $15.75 | $22.75 |
| Week 02 | 76 | Kitty Saucer | $15.53 | $32.53 |
| Week 01 | 77 | Santa Nutcracker | $15.50 | $33.50 |
| Week 02 | 77 | Piggy Bank | $15.50 | $32.50 |
| Week 04 | 77 | Popsicle-Stick Construction | $15.50 | $30.50 |
| Week 07 | 77 | Star of David Plate | $15.50 | $27.50 |
| Week 08 | 77 | Device | $15.50 | $26.50 |
| Week 14 | 77 | Toothbrush Holder | $15.50 | $20.50 |
| Week 12 | 83 | Basketball Trophy | $14.90 | $21.90 |
| Week 01 | 84 | Mule Figurine | $14.50 | $32.50 |
| Week 02 | 84 | Nutcracker with Troll Hair (or something) | $14.50 | $31.50 |
| Week 03 | 84 | Golf Ball Bank | $14.50 | $30.50 |
| Week 14 | 87 | Clown Figurine | $11.61 | $16.61 |
| Week 01 | 88 | Candyland Labyrinth Game | $11.50 | $29.50 |
| Week 01 | 88 | Pen Stand | $11.50 | $29.50 |
| Week 03 | 90 | “Hakuna Matata” Figurine | $10.50 | $26.50 |
| Week 06 | 90 | Small Stapler | $10.50 | $23.50 |
| Week 19 | 90 | Bar Mitzvah Bookends | $10.50 | $10.50 |
| Week 10 | 93 | Coconut Cup | $10.00 | $19.00 |
| Week 10 | 94 | Kentucky Dish | $6.75 | $15.75 |
| Week 01 | 95 | Toy Toaster | $6.25 | $24.25 |
| Week 02 | 96 | Fred Flintstone Pez Dispenser | $5.50 | $22.50 |
| Week 07 | 96 | #1 Mom Hooks | $5.50 | $17.50 |
| Week 11 | 98 | Hawaiian Utensils | $4.24 | $12.24 |
| Week 01 | 99 | Toy Hot Dog | $3.58 | $21.58 |
| Week 07 | 100 | Porcelain Scooter | $2.38 | $14.38 |
PS: If you dig our mug-shaped Significant Objects logo, then you’ll want to check out the Significant Objects Mug Mug, for sale now from Zazzle.
According to the New York Times, there is, in Beijing, “a secret network of detention centers used to prevent aggrieved citizens from lodging complaints against the Chinese government.”
[Image: "Bunk beds are seen in a room in a black jail in Beijing in August 2009," the New York Times explains. Apparently, "more than a dozen illegal detention centers known as black jails exist in Beijing." Photo by Greg Baker for the AP].
It is part of a “Byzantine network of interceptors, guards and holding pens,” the article continues, “used to put off the petitioners who flock to Beijing in the hope that the authorities will resolve longstanding grievances, many of them involving official corruption in their hometowns.”
Like a deleted scene—or alternate ending—from Zhang Yimou’s film The Story of Qiu Ju, we read that “those grabbed off the street often have their cellphones and identification confiscated before being locked away in guesthouses or dank basements. After being held for days or weeks, inadequately fed and sometimes beaten, they are shipped back to their home provinces with the admonition that they stay away from the capital.”
It’s The Trial all over again. From The New York Times:
This need to prevent “too many complainants” from finding their way to the center necessitates the construction and maintenance of counter-spaces—”dank basements” and other makeshift jails—as a kind of architectural buffer held up against political reform. In fact, it’s more like an exact inversion of Kafka’s “Great Wall of China” story, in which an imperial messenger is lost and indefinitely dislocated on a fruitless attempt to find exit from the governmental architecture all around him.
[Image: The Great Wall of China, via Wikipedia].
In that story, we see a messenger whispered something of great importance by the emperor himself; now that messenger simply has to relay his words to the proper authorities elsewhere. However, “how futile are all his efforts,” Kafka writes.
It is buffer space, in other words: space in the way of political communication.
By comparing the incarceration of Chinese citizens to a Kafka story, however, I don’t mean to diminish the very real sense of political alarm one should feel at the existence of these “black jails” in Beijing; I do mean, on the other hand, to point out how different political philosophies spatialize themselves, enlisting architecture—here, an off-the-books architecture forming unofficial spaces of detainment—as a realization of their own sovereign philosophies. That is, certain building types befit certain political philosophies—and unacknowledged prisons are a particularly alarming example of this. Geographer Trevor Paglen‘s work becomes especially disturbing in this regard, as he takes us through places like Camp Delta or the unregulated networks of CIA rendition, and so on.
But I want to go back to the less than reassuring political message of The Story of Qiu Ju, mentioned earlier. The bulk of that film presents viewers with a self-possessed heroine who has stood up, once and for all, for her and her husband’s rights in the face of locally corrupted bureaucrats; but her chain of unaddressed complaints leads her to pursue higher and higher levels of governmental authority, including physical trips outward through more and more distant urban spaces. She soon finds herself emotionally alone in a strange city she cannot navigate, tracking down officials by way of nonsensically over-formalized channels of communication.
And, at the end, she seems to go nowhere. It doesn’t work. She lodges her complaint—and returns home.
[Image: A scene of citizenry and its government, from The Story of Qiu Ju].
But when things suddenly seem to go her way—spoiler alert—it’s at exactly the wrong moment, as if she never should have started the complaint process in the first place. It’s as if, the film ambiguously suggests, the very act of petitioning her government has resulted in these previously unseen layers of government coming into being, materializing out of the haze of invisible sovereignty in order to respond to her call.
She brings the government into existence, in other words, by turning to it for guidance and complaint.
This is a morally unconvincing position to take, especially in a nation like China—but it comes with architectural implications, and these are also relevant here. For instance, would these “black jails” and political holding-rooms need to exist, we might ask in this highly specific context, if rural petitioners would simply stop coming to the city in protest? Perhaps not—but 1) this is all the more reason for such petitioners to visit the capital in record numbers, thus forcing, through sheer spatial absurdity, political change and requiring that their grievances be heard, and 2) it says volumes about any political system if its government would hold the very people who come to it for guidance inside an addressless world of dorm rooms, “dank basements,” secret detention centers, and cots, officially unrecognized except for the time it takes to overlook them.
It would make for a fantastic study: how do governments spatially realize themselves? Is democracy possibility in a nation built for authoritarian control—and vice versa: can true authoritarianism ever be achieved in a space designed against these sorts of peripheral—and easily denied—incarcerations?
Could we reverse-Haussmannize entire nations to make repression a spatial impossibility?
The chemical process of osmosis has been put to work, generating power for a Norwegian utilities firm.
“Sited on the banks of the Oslo fjord in southern Norway,” and using something called the “membrane rig,” New Scientist reports, “it generates electricity using the natural process that keeps plants standing upright and the cells of our own bodies swollen, rigid and hydrated.”
[Images: Screen grabs from a video produced by Statkraft, makers of the technology under discussion here].
The company in charge of the station, Statkraft, estimates—incredibly—that “the total global potential of osmotic power to be around 1700 terawatt-hours per year—about 10 per cent of the world’s current electricity consumption.”
After all, river estuaries are batteries waiting to happen, we read, albeit “a novel kind of battery,” one that turns liquid mixtures into machines.
Ode Magazine steps in here, adding that the process, called reverse electrodialysis, operates by “deriv[ing] clean power from the mixing of saltwater and fresh water.” BLDGBLOG has already explored the possibility that the sedimentary discharge of large rivers might be put to use as large-scale, deltaic 3D printers, but putting rivers to work as a weird new form of electrical equipment sounds at least as exciting.
On the other hand, the total power now being produced by this particular plant in Norway is only “enough to continuously boil two or three kettles.” So this might be good news for a family or two of avid tea-drinkers trapped up there in the cold winter nights of Scandinavia, but it’s still a process very much challenged by scalability.
Gold—the price of which has nearly quadrupled over the past decade—is now being purchased (and hoarded) on such a massive scale that the vaults of New York City have run out of space to store it all in.
[Image: Stackin' it at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City].
The Wall Street Journal reports this week that “fleets of armored trucks piled with gold bars and coins have been streaming out of midtown Manhattan” in a mass movement, perhaps geologically comparable to a landslide, of financialized minerals.
HSBC has apparently “issued an edict that it wanted retail investors to remove their bullion to make space for big institutional customers,” The First Post adds, and so “owners of vaults and warehouses across the United States have had to jump to action.” However, removing gold from the basements of New York City is “easier said than done,” they add—especially as it requires “something approaching a military operation” to get these huge quantities of extraordinarily valuable metal off the island.
The headline sums it up: “Armored trucks leave NYC ‘loaded with gold‘.”
“I have never seen any relocation like this,” says the managing director of FideliTrade. Except, of course, in Die Hard with a Vengeance…
[Image: The solid gold walls of the U.S. Bullion Depository at Ft. Knox].
In fact, some massive new gold heist film should now be forced into production, set in the over-securitized labyrinth of vaults beneath a skyscraper in midtown, a kind of post-Italian-Job-remake example of urban super-thievery, complete with glimpses of the complicated overlapping spatial histories of an earlier island geography, from New York’s forgotten underground rivers (which our criminals could perhaps scuba-dive through) to inexplicable brick walls (bumped up against where the robbers’ maps only show mud). A small baroque pavilion in Central Park could be involved, or perhaps huge rooms of subsurface shelving deep beneath the New York Public Library where CGI-friendly radar equipment could be tested by our future perpetrators.
(Original gold story spotted by Steve Silberman).
