“Everyone’s talking about the weather,” runs a loose translation of an old German political poster, “except us.” The slogan was used to parody a period railroad ad that trumpeted the Deutsche Bahn’s storm-resistant resilience, but it also attempted a deeper point: that meaningful politics is serious business, above the fray of such trivial, provincial preoccupations as the latest shower, hail, or frost.
In a recent essay at 3 Quarks Daily, Alyssa Pelish takes the other side of the argument. At first, she wonders whether talking about the three-day forecast might really be a sort of code obscuring some underlying purpose — functioning as a form of empathy, for example. Ultimately, she sees an even greater significance in sharing news about the weather: it provides one of the few “universally shared narratives” available to everyone.
It’s true that everyone experiences weather, full stop. But the way we do seems like it might be more effective at fostering individual communities rather than any single, universal one. Think, for example, of a snowstorm, when the collective, Herculean task of removing tons and tons of heavy, disruptive white stuff requires a city’s residents to work together — and, together, to interact with their government — at the most intimate, personal level.
Three years ago, people were still complaining that photo-sharing websites like Flickr were home mostly to “thousands of pieces of shit” — few good photos, endless amounts of clichéd snapshots that nobody really wants to see.
Since then, of course, Flickr has proven its worth by attracting plenty of good, serious photographers, and inspiring many more to improve their work and learn more about photography. It has also become something unexpected: a window into the past. Recently, a number of organizations, including Library of Congress, NASA and the Ville de Montréal, have put portions of their photo archives on the website, taking advantage of its user-friendly format and ready-made connection to social networks.
Private individuals have followed their lead, giving old film photos new life. One such photographer is Nick DeWolf, a American engineer who lived in Philadelphia, Boston and later Colorado, and who never left home without a camera. For decades, starting in the 1950s, he documented almost everywhere he went. After DeWolf’s death in 2006, his son-in-law began putting his photos online.
There are now more than 43,000 images in DeWolf’s Flickr photostream, with 20 more added each day. Among these are scenes of everyday 1950s, 60s and 70s life in cities like New York, Boston and Hong Kong, shot with the passion, curiosity and loose focus of an amateur.
Bill Brand’s “Masstransiscipe” installation in New York’s subway
I first noticed subway tunnel wall animations in Boston, where the long gaps between stations on the MBTA Red Line provides a captive audience. The animation, composed of dozens of stills that simulated movement as the train zoomed by, was an ad. The message: visit Vermont and its great outdoors, which certainly must have resonated with more than a few claustrophobes riding the crowded rush hour rails.
Animated ads in subway tunnels are expensive, both to design and install, which helps explain why the Vermont ad’s successor, a campaign for a movie “coming to theatres” last February, was only removed recently — with no ready replacement. But the medium is a popular one, if only because it’s relatively novel and rare. Examples from Budapest, Hong Kong, Kiev, L.A., Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. have been enthusiastically documented for upload to YouTube. And given that cash-strapped transit agencies have allowed almost every other subway surface to be colonized by ad space, including seats and whole exteriors of rolling stock, it was almost a logical next step.
Much of the credit for introducing these flipbook or zoetrope-like ads goes to two independent innovators: New York astrophysics student Joshua Spodek and Winnipeg animator Bradley Caruk. Spodek’s ads debuted in Atlanta in 2001; his company, Sub Media, continues to produce similar ads today. In 2006, Caruk won a Manning Innovation Award for his concept, which his partner, Rob Walker, first thought up while staring at the blank walls of Paris’ Metro. The company they co-founded, SideTrack Technologies, set up its first system in Kuala Lumpur and has since opened others across the United States — and beyond, to London, Rio de Janeiro, and cities in Mexico.
Caruk’s system, which relies on motion-sensitive LEDs, made subway advertising widespread and profitable. The MBTA raked in $1.5 million in SideTrack’s first two years of operation in Boston, and one ad alone brought the L.A. Metro the equivalent of 192,000 new riders in revenue. But he was hardly the first person to experiment with subway animation.
Four decades have passed since the end of formal racial segregation in the United States, but as anyone can tell you, informal segregation remains a part of everyday life in many areas of the country. That becomes especially clear when you look at Eric Fischer‘s new maps of race and ethnicity in major American cities. In each of these new maps, one dot represents 25 people, and each dot’s colour represents a racial or ethnic group as defined by the US Census: non-Hispanic white is red, black is blue, Hispanic is orange and Asian is green.
Every city in the world is divided along some lines, be they ethnic, linguistic or economic, but what is shocking about Fischer’s maps is how many American cities remain starkly divided according to race. Just look at Detroit, where 8 Mile Road is visible not only as the border between city and suburbs but as the line of demarcation between black and white.
(Along with ethnicity, the maps also illustrate population density — the more densely-populated an area, the more opaque it appears on the map. What surprises me about the Detroit map, along with the starkness of the city’s racial divide, is how the city proper remains just as dense as the suburbs, despite massive depopulation.)
In most cities of the developed world, mechanical street sweepers are a fact of life. Even New York’s carless commuters are fluent in strategies to use on “alternate-side parking days,” when the scheduled passing of a street sweeper forces all of a block’s parked cars to one side of the street. It’s easy to forget that, before these behemoth, motorized sponges began scrubbing the streets en masse, even the widest boulevards were cleaned by hand. This street sweeper in 1910 New York would have his work cut out for him after his beat — Fifth Avenue — was considerably widened that year. Although the mechanical sweeper had debuted in 1840s Manchester, it took nearly a century to catch on almost everywhere else.
Of course, street cleaners — some wielding handmade brooms — are a common sight in the poorer countries of the so-called Global South. But old photos of individual sweepers toiling to keep dry the rain-soaked streets of currently presently, hypermodern Tokyo come as a bit of a shock. The photo above, from the collection of the Dutch Naational Archief, is dated “circa 1930,” though some commenters think it might have been taken even later, perhaps in the immediate postwar era. Almost nothing here is recognizable as contemporary Tokyo — except maybe the electronics store in the background. Many of the street sweepers are wearing conical hats typical of agricultural field laborers, and some are even sporting a mino, a traditional form of raincoat made from straw.
Virtual World: The future of China’s largest city is on bombastic display at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Centre
Set in the seclusion of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, well inside the largest of New York’s outer boroughs, the Queens Museum of Art doesn’t attract the same blockbuster number of international visitors as the megamuseums and power galleries of Manhattan. That hardly means it fails to draw from cosmopolitan sources — in a borough as diverse as Queens, appealing to the local population means displaying art that speaks to many points of origin. But the museum is best known for a work of very local significance: the Panorama of the City of New York, a vast scale model of the five boroughs built on Robert Moses’ orders for the 1964 World’s Fair.
Despite an occasional lack of updates — including one twenty-some year gap — the Panorama has been kept fairly timely. Though the last comprehensive upgrade took place in 1992, sponsors can now adopt buildings and ensure the accuracy of a given plot on the map. There are some exceptions where updates are off limits; the museum preferred the World Trade Center towers remain standing rather than represent Ground Zero (they will be replaced when the new site’s new towers are completed). But by and large, the model is a decent representation of the city — precise enough to use for mapping geodata.
Last year, urban planner and artist Damon Rich did just that, taking advantage of the Panorama to detail the extent of home foreclosures in New York. Reasoning that, for many New Yorkers, the foreclosure crisis appeared to be something taking place in far-flung Sunbelt suburbs, his aim was to bring the extent of the national real estate debacle home to a city that didn’t yet seem to realize the problem had reached its front stoop.
For all the questionable writing that’s abused or insensitively applied the term “urban frontier”, Brooklyn’s sleepy, sometimes desolate Red Hook neighborhood actually feels like one — and nowhere is this more apparent than on somnambulant Van Brunt Street.
The neighborhood’s main commercial thoroughfare sets the pace for Red Hook’s streetlife with its lack thereof: as much a testament to the street’s sedateness as to the pioneering urban horticulturalists who tend them, giant sunflowers sprout from the sidewalk cracks, leaping to human height. The still life composition of Van Brunt’s Hopperesque facades brings to mind country hamlets closed up on Sunday. And on a streetscape that conjures the Great Plains, a prominent restaurant bears a coincidentally appropriate name — Fort Defiance.
Change is a constant in most cities, and it’s no surprise that a decade can yield dramatic alterations to a specific street or even storefront. Take this slice of San Francisco’s Mission Street, photographed by Eric Fischer, creator of the locals v. tourists photography maps, which he captured in 2000 and again just last year.
In 2000, the block was showing evidence of prosperity. The millennium bug hadn’t shut down “Y2K Furnishings”, despite its ominous name. And the space next door is decorated in retro-50s futurism, reflecting a latent desire to resurrect that decade’s optimistic streak. But what Y2K didn’t do to San Francisco, the dot-com bubble’s burst ultimately did. In 2000, Y2K Furnishings was already having a going out of business sale. Today, save for one floor of the building it formerly occupied, the entire block looks mothballed.
The story of Y2K’s block is fairly rare, but it’s not wholly unique. It demonstrates one way in which cities have defied the narrative arc of unremitting, sometimes totalizing gentrification that U.S. cities have been said to confront throughout much of the 2000s. At worst, the last ten years of gentrification have been more mild, and less sweeping, than many critics have assumed.
We’ve always known there is a gulf between the city as experienced by tourists and the city lived in by locals. Now we have a fun visual representation of that divide. Using various types of data from Flickr, one user of the photo-sharing website, Eric Fisher, has created maps that indicate the spots photographed by tourists and those shot by locals. Local photographs are blue, tourist photos red and undetermined photos yellow.
There are some problems in the methodology. Whether a Flickr user is a local or a tourist is determined by whether they photograph a given location over a long period of time (like a local would) or in just a few days (like a tourist would). That seems fair enough, but not everyone geotags their photos, which could possibly skew the results one way or another. One person who obsessive geotags all of his or her photos could have a disproportionately large representation on the map. You can see this in Vancouver, where one person’s geotagged cycle routes are prominently displayed.
Still, just by looking at the maps you get a strong intuitive sense that they are close to reality. In the Montreal map, tourists overwhelmingly stick to Old Montreal, St. Joseph’s Oratory and the Olympic Stadium while locals take photos throughout downtown and the Plateau, with an especially notable cluster of local shots around Lafontaine Park, Maisonneuve Park and the Botanical Gardens (which, interestingly enough, are right across the street from the Olympic tourist hub).
True, Patrick Jean’s 8-bit 80s arcade game-inspired New York invasion video, “PIXELS”, will soon be featured on nearly every blog on the internet. But it struck me as so in keeping to some of the other work featured here — from Jan Vormann’s Lego brick street art to this Berlin housing block game of Tetris (repeated on an art deco skyscraper above) — that it would be a shame not to put it in context with these — not to mention some earlier antecedents (the appearance of a frog hopping across the street — a clear reference to the old game Frogger — brings to mind the meta-heroics of Seinfeld‘s George Costanza, attempting to push an old Frogger machine across a busy New York street in a fashion similar to the game itself).
Combined with tilt-shift videography, which has made actual cities appear toylike, these projects all seem to share the same underlying theme: a certain deconstruction of the barrier between the imaginary world (particularly of play) and the actual — a desegregation of virtual and reality. In the video, this is literally (and dramatically) illustrated by the explosion of pixels from the TV screen in which they’d been confined. Such works seem to presage in art the emerging world of augmented reality, which recently began to filter into the consumer mainstream with the release of Google’s Goggles application, in which a smartphone photo can be translated into a digital data stream, integrating networked data into the public sphere.
It’s a familiar scene across Asia: a small cart bright with fluorescent light and flanked by rickety fold-up tables and plastic stools. Simple, inexpensive dishes are served on brightly-coloured melamine plates.
If it’s in a Taipei back alley, it could be beef noodle soup; in a Hong Kong dai pai dong, French toast with a glass of milk tea. In this particular case, it was pad thai on an uneven sidewalk in Bangkok, inches from the roaring traffic of Asoke Road.
I placed my order (which wasn’t hard — most stalls only specialize in a few dishes) and sat down on a bright blue stool at a table with bottles of fish sauce, vinegar and chili. A few minutes later, the cook handed me the pad thai. It struck a nice balance between the full-mouthed savouriness of the fish sauce and dried shrimp and the tang of lime and tamarind. All told, it was probably one of the better attempts at the dish I’ve had. I paid when I left: 30 baht, just under one Canadian dollar.
I’m a great fan of Jean Leloup not only because we share a name (though his is made up and mine is real) or because he lived near me and I used to see him on the street every other day. I like him because he’s probably the strangest, most brilliant musician to have ever performed in Quebec.
The video for one of his earliest songs, “Isabelle (J’te déteste)” pokes fun at Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal New Wave film, À bout de souffle, with some great scenes of Montreal and New York in 1991. It also opens with a fantastic cameo by Julien Poulin, the actor who became famous by playing Elvis Gratton.
worst anti-bike lane arguments ever: pretending cyclists don't pay taxes, cost of "wide stripes of paint", rain erosion http://t.co/i723dTGKabout 7 hours agofrom web
fans of jason hawkes' gorgeous night aerials of london: here's more of his work, in large format, from across the UK http://t.co/Z0RGSCQSabout 12 hours agofrom web
after the whole shipping container architecture trend, shipping pallet street furniture was probably inevitable http://t.co/fHlgChBoabout 15 hours agofrom web
