From farm to fork, the use of urban spaces is greening up, from Baltimore to Detroit. Carolyn Steel on ‘How to Feed a City.’ (And Robert Neuwirth on ‘Squatter Cities.’) More to come.
Georges Perec, 1936-1982 (I mean, come on. Look at that face.)
Fitting that, moments after running into my favorite writing teacher, sociologist Jim Jasper (see his comments on how to write better here and how to give better talks here), I came across a little blog post on a ‘definitive’ reissue of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, which has been out of print for a bit. I have commented on the book (and Calvino’s) earlier, but I was inspired to learn more about the Oulipo group, which sought to promote new forms of writing. As Joshua Cohen, in the blog Tablet, explains:
Those constraints include, but are not limited to: Anagram; Palindrome; Word Limits; Vowel Limits; Word Replacement (in which every occurrence of a noun is replaced by another noun; for example, if noun = umbrella, then that fragment should read “in which every occurrence of an umbrella is replaced by another umbrella”); Vowel Replacement (in which the word ‘noun’ might be turned to ‘noon,’ the hour, or ‘naan,’ the Middle Asian flatbread, or to ‘neon,’); the Snowball (a poem’s verse or sentence in which each word is exactly one letter longer than the preceding word); and the Lipogram, from the Greek lipagrammatos (“missing symbol”), in which a text is generated that excludes one or more letters.
Print Newspaper Circulation, 1990-2009
Left Vs Right via 'Information is Beautiful'
Click to go to the interactive map of U.S. Marriage and Divorce Rates
three disconnected thoughts about books from this week
Published September 26, 2009 reading Leave a Comment
Closeup of the gorgeous 'Our Faces and Sounds Got Lost in the Clouds' by a favorite ethnographer moonlighting as a fabulist renderer.
A few thoughts on books from the last week. First, a colleague stopped me in the cafe to let me know about an Chronicle of Higher Education article on Google’s Book Search being a ‘disaster’ for academics because its data is often incorrect. Yikes. Second, this week one of my new colleagues, Jay Demerath, invited faculty to come into his office to pick out any books that he or she wanted. A generous and dangerous offer with a warning: “You all may be in the last generation to experience the problem of dealing with books upon your retirement.” The visit made me really contemplate teaching, careers, and my ever-growing library. He said that the grad students just didn’t know what classic books are anymore (undoubtedly a frequent lament). Despite the warning of an unwieldy library at the end of a career, I picked up Halle’s Inside Culture, Sacks’ massive Conversation Analysis lectures, and Jeffrey Alexander’s four volume set Theoretical Logic in Sociology, among other things. Third, friends and I descended upon the League of Women Voters Book Sale this morning as if I had not picked up enough books at Jay’s office. I nabbed a few goodies (Hodgeman’s More Information Than You Require, Schott’s Miscellany, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, and Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia), but was amazed at the piles of great books that book resellers had squirreled away in the corners of the High School cafeteria. Upon asking one of the volunteers, I was told that they pay a $10 fee to come in early and, essentially, scrape the cream off for themselves, searching prices on their iPhones and then taking their time to toss back the small fish. I had mixed feelings about it, but the ladies I spoke insisted that they make a ton of money off of these folks. There’s a thread in here somewhere… in lieu of a summary, a link to Benjamin’s essay on book collecting.
One of David Byrne's Bike Racks, which can be found throughout NYC
This has to be the fifth post out of the 120 posts that is on David Byrne, which is overkill, but I’m very excited to get The Bicycle Diaries in the mail. Am I wrong to hope that it is like a Walter Benjaminesque mediation on cities, as he bikes through NYC, London, Buenos Aries, Istanbul, Berlin and beyond? Am I wrong to hope that it could be a companion piece to Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City? Perhaps I will use it in Urban Sociology soon…
Our values and hopes are sometimes awfully embarrassingly easy to read. They’re right there – in the storefronts, museums, temples, shops, and office buildings and in how these structures interrelate, or sometimes don’t… Riding a bike through all this is like navigating the collective neural pathways of some vast global mind.
sampling, copyright, and the world’s most important 6-second break
Published September 15, 2009 culture , tech Leave a Comment
The battle between people-turned-symbols of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses is well-worn and yet evergreen. As much as I like using Simmel and Benjamin and Haussman, a new book by Anthony Flint, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City revisits the more contemporary exchange. A nice review is here.
I love Photoshop, at times
This Machine Kills Fascists
It’s hard to argue against the relationship between coffee and gentrification. Sharon Zukin, for example, writes about ‘pacification by cappuccino‘ and my new neighbor Andrew Papachristos writes about the interrelationship between crime and coffee. I’ll just say this for now: The Blue Bottle’s Kyoto style cold-brewed chemistry set of a machine made me come back five times in four days. I groveled to get my last cup before I headed out of town.
Finding delicious coffee should be added to either Kieran’s or Andrew’s ASA Bingo cards. Although I’m doing my best to reserve judgment on Atlanta’s coffee scene.
Coffee Shop, 1956
Tangentially (although coffeeshop-related), there is something to be said for catching a good museum exhibit. In my case, coming early to the ASA, I made it to a Robert Frank exhibit at the SfMoMA. Four rooms were dedicated to the four sections of The Americans. (Read Anthony Lane’s writeup here.) It was an incredible experience, and the narrative became overwhelming, if a little forced by the placards. I use RF via Howard Becker’s Telling About Society for my Media and Technology class, as his work is clearly sociological. He writes:
Robert Frank’s (…) enormously influential The Americans is in ways reminiscent both of Tocqueville’s analysis of American institutions and of the analysis of cultural themes by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Frank presents photographs made in scattered places around the country, returning again and again to such themes as the flag, the automobile, race, restaurants—eventually turning those artifacts, by the weight of the associations in which he embeds them, into profound and meaningful symbols of American culture.
Fellow museum compatriot, Patrick Inglis, reminded me of Walker Evans‘ style of taking surreptitious photographs of his subjects, and it got me thinking about technique a little more.
In San Francisco for the ASA, I did a little scouting around and came across a bunch of ‘unaccepted streets’ thanks to a lovely local. She told me about how these are a ‘public right of way’ that has not been built according to city standards and has not been accepted by the city’s Board of Supervisors for maintenance. These are scattered all over the town, and the residents are required to take care of them. According to the San Francisco Public Works Code:
Residents of Penny Lane Arrange a Beautification Day
sec. 400.1. Owners of frontage responsible for removal of rubbish or debris from unaccepted streets that are unpaved. It shall be the duty of the owners of lots or portions of lots immediately adjacent to any portion of the roadway of any unpaved street, avenue, lane, alley, court or place, or any portion of any sidewalk thereof, in the City and County of San Francisco, none of which has been accepted by the Supervisors as by law or as in the Charter of said City and County provided, to maintain said roadways or sidewalks adjacent to their property free and clear of rubbish or debris. (Added by Ord. 16-71, App. 1/26/71)
The San Francisco Public Trust has a plan to make these spaces into ‘street parks,’ but what is interesting is that many locals have enchanted these places into their own: transforming them into public gardens, or making their own mosaic-tiled parking space. I was also fascinated by the little paths and stairs that weave around people’s homes, that have these lovely pockets in which residents have decorated them with flowers, art, and mosaics.
This stands in dramatic contrast with what I have always thought of as ‘privately owned public spaces:’ Corporate-held public plazas–in which landowners could build beyond their envelope due to a 1961 Zoning Plan incentive program–detailed in Jerold Kayden’s excellent book. The NYC Department of City Planning reports:
Approximately 16 percent of the spaces are actively used as regional destinations or neighborhood gathering spaces, 21 percent are usable as brief resting places, 18 percent are circulation-related, four percent are being renovated or constructed, and 41 percent are of marginal utility.
Venice Canals
While in San Francisco, I also hung out with Venice Beach urbanist, Andrew Deener, and he told me that his work touches on the Venice Canals, which exist in a way similar to SF’s unaccepted streets: this one-time aspiring Disneyland/Coney Island neighborhood fell on hard times, but is now a isolated bourgeois citadel thanks to these manufactured canals. Interestingly, like the unaccepted roads in San Fransisco, the City does nothing to maintain the canals, even though they are the only way for residents (and city services) to access their homes.
At the same time, there is some research being conducted by twittering, which can be seen here, and Richard Wiseman’s take on it can be read here. Also, from the data visualization file, here’s a nice image (although I’m not sure who the gray people are, and the ‘5 with more than 100 followers’ should probably ‘5 with more than 10 followers’ if this were at the scale the author makes it):
'Don't get too excited'
Update: More pretty data visualization about Twitter here.
Swan Song?
An Op-Ed piece by Charles Blow notes that analysts give the music industry 10 years:
A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.
The NYTimes has a nice graphic on the fadeout.
The New Yorker has an article about ticket sales, TicketMaster and LiveNation, ‘The Price of the Ticket.’ Within, John Seabrook interviews Princeton Economist states that, there’s “still an element of rock concerts that is more like a party than a commodities market,” and that it bears resemblance to the gift exchange.
Related, here’s a piece on how the publishing industry, as it exists today, is doomed.
The ‘JK Wedding Dance’ bounced around the internet a few weeks ago… When I clicked on it, I didn’t recognize the people or the song, nor did I catch the interest in it. But I started snooping around about it when thinking about the Media, Technology and Society class. It turns out that a few people have thought about it. If I told you that it was a brilliant money generating video, you might think that it was viral marketing a la these Levi’s commercials. But it’s not. The song is Chris Brown’s ‘Forever,’ and it’s popularity has skyrocketed one year after the release, the iTunes downloads hit #4, and #3 on Amazon’s MP3 list (Amazon sells MP3s?).
YouTube searches for 'chris brown forever'
YouTube’s business blog notes:
This traffic is also very engaged — the click-through rate (CTR) on the “JK Wedding Entrance” video is 2x the average of other Click-to-Buy overlays on the site. And this newfound interest in downloading “Forever” goes beyond the viral video itself: “JK Wedding Entrance” also appears to have influenced the official “Forever” music video, which saw its Click-to-Buy CTR increase by 2.5x in the last week.
Part two of this story is that Chris Brown has been in the press more for his domestic abuse. (Click here for a sobering statistic that over half of Boston teenagers think that Rhianna was to blame for the incident). When I found the JK Wedding website, this issue was not lost on them. They write:
We hope to direct this positivity to a good cause. Due to the circumstances surrounding the song in our wedding video, we have chosen the Sheila Wellstone Institute. Sheila Wellstone was an advocate, organizer, and national champion in the effort to end domestic violence in our communities.
Even if the bride didn’t get into the dance too much, I do give them both credit for this. The Sheila Wellstone Institute is here.
On Iran, we have two uses of technology at work. The first is brought to us via the Iranian Government and Photoshop:
Iranian Photoshoppin'
This was dispersed via traditional media sources. (You might remember the Photoshopped missile launch too.) At the same time, we have a great deal of news coming out of Tehran via twitter, when Western Media has been otherwise exiled or confined to their hotels. Andrew Sullivan is hosting ‘LiveTweeting the Revolution‘ and has a nice discussion about Foucauldian ‘soft power.’ The Obama Administration asked Twitter to postpone their upgrades as to not interfere with the Twit-o-lution. (There was also an instance of Nigerians using texting to monitor their vote in 2007.) In a minor sidenote, Republicans are not only attempting to make waves by twittering, but Rep Pete Hoekstra twittered that what was going on in Iran was ’similar’ to what they did last year in their shutdown of the House. (He’s being teased via twitter, in return.)
Clay Shirky points out that this is not technological capital, but social capital traveling from Nigeria to the Western World. This is a nice, clear example of how the producer-consumer relationship on news has changed drastically.
Updated (06/20/09):
Boing Boing has forwarded a request to help Iranian activists: By changing one’s Twitter location (in settings) to Tehran, GMT +3:30, to make it more difficult for Iranian authorities to hunt down Iranian activist bloggers and Twitterers. See the Iran Election Cyberwar Guide for Beginners. (I did it, but that’s the most that I’ve done with my account in weeks.)
Late Update (11/3/09):
The U.S.’s Joint Terrorism Task Force doesn’t really care for Twitter activists either. Read about an anarchist activist whose house was raided for using Twitter to disseminate information about police activity (gleaned from police scanners) to G-20 protesters in Pittsburgh here. (The charges were eventually dropped.)
