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2009.06.11

cabbage by sony

MetreonAn Andrew Sullivan commenter has a remarkable narrative about the emergence of a farmer's market inside San Francisco's once-high-tech shopping experience, the Sony Metreon at Yerba Buena Gardens.

I used to work around the corner from the Metreon.  I recall it a sleek and vaguely industrial space with mostly black metal surfaces, with a cinema, a CD/DVD store, a bookstore, and some restaurants, though there was also a programmable central space where some kind of light show always seemed to be happening.  Anyway, it was supposed to be the place where the people could encounter the latest entertainment technologies.  Now you can buy cabbage there.

I'd love to hear other narratives from people who've been there lately.

Cross-posted from Human Transit

2009.04.26

human transit

My new professional blog is now live, here.  Please drop in.  But don't worry if it's not your thing.  I'll still be riffing here. 

2009.02.01

notes on the mall

Although the economic crisis is supposedly global, David Segal's New York Times piece on shopping malls struck this exiled blogger with a definite twinge of "only in America."

The economic crisis has caused shoppers to go into an essentials-only mode. But the mall has never trafficked in essentials. You can’t, for instance, fill a prescription at the Mall of America, because it doesn’t have a pharmacy. You can, however, buy a vanilla hazelnut fragrance candle in the shape of a miniature cooking skillet. Or a $13 baseball hat that looks as though it’s made of cheddar cheese. A store called Corda-Roy’s sells a variety of bean bags that convert into beds. Magnet Max sells a battery-operated guinea pig that runs continuously on a spinning exercise wheel.

While equally absurd objects are for sale in Australia, I don't believe I've ever seen an Australian mall without a pharmacy, a supermarket, and vendors of fresh produce and meats.  I distantly recall that the same is true of malls in Europe.  Only America has tried to police a separation between the mall and the less exalted retail action of the supermarket and pharmacy.  The supermarket and pharmacy are for the needs of the body, but the mall is for (what remains of) our spirit.  Of course, you could also say that this is really an opposition of the desiring body, which we feed at the supermarket, vs. the desired body that we construct -- via clothes, fragrances, and even electronics -- at the mall.

Big-box retail has triumphed at the bottom of the market in part by erasing this boundary, but the middle class American still seems to value this separation of desiring and being desired which so cleverly masquerades as an opposition of body and spirit.  It will be interesting to watch this drama play out as the middle class shrinks, and their bodies' desires grow.

2008.12.31

two flaneurs in barcelona

Several months ago, before it was everyone's patriotic duty, I bought a plasma television.  Like almost all acts of shopping, the purchase was tinged with mortification, and not just because plasma screens have become a global symbol of Consumption (a word increasingly tinged with its older meaning, that of a wasting disease). 

Shopping is mortifying because shopping is war.  Stores are not meant to sell me what I want, but to make me want what they have.  Often I feel like Frodo in Mordor: I'm deep in enemy territory, and the easiest thing to do is put on the ring, surrender.  Just buy something, the store tells me, and you'll be happy.  In fact, you'll be one of us.

When it comes to electronics, the act of buying is also a roll of the dice, or if you prefer, an act of faith.  On average, these products do about 80% of what they're advertised to do, and the obstacles to returning them ensure that those responsible never find out how defective their products are.  Remote controls elevate the defect to a design principle.  My television's remote has 58 buttons.  Four of them seem to do something, but only if I shake the remote firmly while pressing them, as though I were an angry old man with Parkinson's disease.

And yet I bought a plasma screen.  I'm looking at it now, from two meters away on the couch.  I never connected it to a television signal, of course; I get all the broadcast television I need at the gym.  Rarely, I use it for movies.  Mostly it's my computer screen for writing.  But its highest use, as it turns out, is Google Earth.

Today, for example, my friend and mentor Alan Greiner wrote to me about his recent trip to Barcelona, so I opened up Google Earth and followed along:

A comfortable little hotel near Placa Catalunya and La Rambla set me in the center of things

Barcelona zoomin

Yes, that's Plaza de Catalunya right in the centre, on the seam that separates the old city (lower right) from the perfectly gridded 19th-century Eixample district in the upper left.  Of the latter my friend writes:

All streets within the grid arrive at crossings, of course, but these are filled with light, space, and air, for at each crossing the corners of the buildings have been cut off!

... and rather than waiting for him to describe what he means, I just go look.  Sure enough ...

Barcelona eixample

... so when I return to his explanation, my aerial view can dance with my friend's street-level eye ...

Not just a bit of corner is cut; there's enough diagonal space for large, ornate apartment house doorways with windows and balconies to each side. Walking in L'Eixample means long distances, as the crosswalks are on the parallels, not the diagonal cuts, and the roundabouts out there really hum.

... and I end up with a richer impression than either perspective would have on its own. 

What I can't show you, with screen-shots in a blog, is the freedom and lightness with which I move about in Google Earth, zooming or panning to follow the lightest breezes of curiosity. (What's that?  Well, let's look ... wait a minute, where is the water? ... zoom out .. oh, there it is, so it's facing the water, see? ... but what's that over there? ...).  It is, in short, the fundamental sensation of the flaneur, the aimless pedestrian free to follow the slightest impulses.  I've written as a flaneur of Sydney and Delhi, and my friend is another of the species:

You would be challenged and have fun writing about Barcelona, a city that sputtered and splashed up from its sea-port long ago, grew extraordinarily wealthy, gambled on Catalan blood, shed the same in battles and purges, fell into dire poverty and slowly pulled itself together and up, bootstrap by halyard. ...  Architecturally one can, in the space of a day's amble, walk through its entire history, and in some places find at an intersection the whole of it in the facades of buildings and houses.

... and reading this I let my eye wander over the city on Google Earth, zooming in for detail or out for context, until I find examples of the jumble he describes.  There's actually a block called Illa de la Discòrdia, the "block of discord," where houses by three famous architects, working in different styles, sit clashingly side by side, like enemies consigned for eternity to the same pit of hell.  Zoom into it on Google Earth, and of course there's a link to a photo, actually a beautiful 1906 rendering.

I didn't mean to lead you far into that distraction, but for the flaneur, distraction itself is the point. Gaze at almost any city on Google Earth, and something will arouse your curiosity.  Zoom in, poke around.  In one optional layer, little blue dots on the aerial image are links to photographs that various travelers have posted.  Looking at Barcelona, then, I can immediately identify the main tourist attractions, such as the Sagrada Familia, from the mass of blue dots buzzing around them like flies.

In some countries, of course, there's also Street View, photos taken at regular intervals by Google camera-cars driving along each street.  They are the opposite of tourist photos:  pure records of whatever is there, important or not.

Barcelona streetview

Street View might appear to let us be flaneurs worldwide from our livingrooms.  But while Street View arouses this desire it fails to satify it.  For one thing, the photos are static, and at street-level the real life and texture of the city can't be seen in a static image.  Someday, perhaps there will be Street View video, with sounds and smells and maybe even virtual experiences -- young people of your preferred sex hailing you seductively in cafes etc.  That, finally, may be the solution to the carbon footprint problem of air travel.

But more important, Street View is obviously the view of a dead mechanical eye.  Even the most amateur photographer would not have taken the Street View photograph above; there is no subject, no point of view, no figure and ground -- in short, there is no desire. Nobody cares, so when I look at Street View I usually don't care either.  Once I'm on the street, or inside a building, I defer to good writing by a real flaneur, such as my friend Alan:

To emerge from hours within Casa Batllo upon the busy avenues of the city is a shock, akin to shaking off the droplets of that clear water to discover, suddenly, a surrounding, fairly well-organized, wild animal zoo. People, vespas, cabs, cars, flashing lights, a headless mannequin in a store window, each main street shouting with its own Christmas lighting display, gigantic computer-controlled snowflakes falling down the curved steel-and-glass facade of the big department store, the tapas bars full, and one's stomach not. On the third night I found a favorite little place, though, where the kitchen was simple, hot, inexpensive, and excellent -- to me, at least, after walking all day, often much farther than I'd have planned. But who plans, yes?

Yes, by definition, the flaneur never plans, and in this respect I'm like a flaneur when I follow along.  At home in Sydney with my plasma TV and Google Earth, I can soar and dive over Barcelona like an obnoxious daredevil pilot, whose darkest secret is that he'd rather be a pedestrian.

2008.12.29

on the city and the progressive agenda


I just left the following comment for progressive blogger Matthew Yglesias, in response to his request for topics that he should focus on in the coming year.  It's actually a very, very old idea of mine:

Your interest in urbanist issues appears to be the primary distinguishing feature of your product, much as health policy is for Ezra Klein.  You need to go deeper into this.

Decisions made in the next two years will largely determine the shape of urban life for the rest of our lives, much as decisions to encourage car-dependence in the 1940s-50s shaped everything about American life in the following half-century.

The health and attractiveness of cities as actually at the foundation of almost all progressive issues.  The narcissism of conservatism in the last few decades has been made possible, in part, by the atomizing quality of suburban life -- the way it allows you to associate only with people you choose, and thus to experience the true diversity of your society, and the full range of its problems, only on television.

People who live in real cities have a lived experience of their entire society, in all its diversity and with all its problems.  It's simply obvious, when living in cities, that a huge range of problems can only be solved by collective action, which in turn requires a positive view of government and a willingness to fight for government that is both activist and competent. 

Americans will only grow comfortable with the progressive agenda if they grow comfortable with big, dense cities, and increasingly want to live in them.  So I hope you will use your influence to educate more progressives about urban policy issues, and encourage more of them to activism in this area.

2008.11.30

jørn utzon, 1918-2008

Syd hbr vw
That's it on the right.  Those -- what would you call them?  Shells?  Flaps?  They seem to be moving, no?  Falling into the harbor, or crawling out?  Trying to fly, maybe?  Mammalian?  Avian?  Crustacean?

Continue reading "jørn utzon, 1918-2008" »

2008.11.06

a challenge to the blogosphere

I have a challenge to put to the blogosphere, based on my last post

Continue reading "a challenge to the blogosphere" »

our work, contd.

Peter, in his excellent discussion the "Obama as Moses" meme the other day, mentioned the speech on race and the lack of action that followed.  He seems to have appreciated the comment I left, so I thought I'd post it, only slightly improved:

Continue reading "our work, contd." »

2008.11.04

now, fiercely

Yes, I'm aware that in the last hours before the presidential election, the final chance to savor the uncertainty before it all turns leaden with fact, I have been writing about flowers in Australia, and common flowers at that.

Continue reading "now, fiercely" »

2008.09.28

the flaneur in nouméa

My stay in New Caledonia was primarily about natural history, but we did stay in the capital, Nouméa, and I took a few hours to stroll in the city centre. 

Continue reading "the flaneur in nouméa" »

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