Here's a few good picks for the week, taken from my Twitter account and my Delicious bookmarks to expand upon why they're worth your while. Now that we're resettled I am updating regularly, so feel free to check those out.
# This argument, which holds that Michael Jackson would not have become who he was were it not for the urban form of Los Angeles. Sure, there were other big factors at play in his evolution into the grotesque superstar we all knew, the author notes. But among those were the way that the environment of Los Angeles--its "feel," which is shaped, of course, by economics, culture, and geography--configures the lives of its citizens in unique ways.
I think that the author is on to something, but her argument falters by pointing the finger directly at LA specifically--in my opinion, the real landscape of alienation is not endemic to Los Angeles, but in hermetically sealed, privacy-obsessed outlying suburbs around the country. ("Weeds" and "Big Love" spring to mind: both prominently feature suburbia and issues of privacy and alienation.)
It's interesting, this overlap between celebrity and sense of place, how the one informs the other. Yes, a place like New York, with bona fide density and a functioning public realm, does to some extent disallow the kind of autonomy and focus on the self that a town made up of "th[ose] estate[s] on top of the hill" would. But LA is also dense, more so than you may think. Its image as airy, bright, spacious--exacerbated by photographers like the recently departed Julius Shulman (above)--is myth. Or at least history.
Actually, maybe it's that myth of LA that shaped Michael Jackson and shapes countless other celebrities--that old Modernist myth that Southern California is the most perfect, final manifestation of what's American; the place you become yourself, to the most perverse Nth degree--and not LA and California as it actually is. There's that tired old concept that the defining charcter of California is its unreality; but I think anyone who has ever read Margaret Crawford or Mike Davis knows better.
# The book Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, by Paul Auge. A reprint of a 1995 analysis of the anonymous, quasi-public spaces where we spend so much time: shopping centers, airports, hotels, highways.
In other words, the Aerotropolis and its environs. The backdrop to Airworld.
From PD Smith's March review:
The forces of globalisation and urbanisation are creating ever more of these Ballardian non-places, symptoms of a Muzak-filled supermodernity in which "people are always, and never, at home". Unsettling, elegantly written and illuminating: essential reading for anyone seeking to understand our supermodern condition.
# Speaking of non-places, check out this plan for soundscaping the subway station at 96th St. in New York, featuring natural Muzak:
Chirping birds, rustling leaves, a burbling brook: not the first sounds that come to mind about the New York City subway. But starting next year, the city’s subterranean soundtrack — a familiar overture of clanks, screeches, groans and beeps — is poised to add a few noises of a more verdant variety.
The sounds will join a canopy of stainless-steel flowers hanging above the turnstiles, an abstracted nod to the station's once-rural surroundings and the tension between that past and the hustle of the station's present.
I join the author of the NYT article in wondering how this will come off during the course of a normal day's operations, with the din of trains passing through and announcements booming overhead. The only comparison I can come up with is the sounds of a ship's horn that play at the baggage claim in the Fort Lauderdale airport when one's luggage arrives (an allusion to the nearby port, no doubt)--but this comes off as silly, not contextual. But who knows--maybe the sounds of an imagined, pre-settlement 96th St. will prove soothing?
# Finally, take a look at a series of videos describing the Denver Living Streets Initiative, via Rocky Mountain PBS. More than a streetscape improvement plan, the Living Streets Initiative aims to fine-tune and revamp a range of Denver city neighborhoods, addressing "green living, community health, local economic growth, greater transportation choice and improved accessibility and connectivity for all users of the street (bikes, pedestrians and cars alike)." An impressive, holistic push to improve the quality of the built environment, tying to economics and lifestyle and corresponding with the construction of a vast new commuter rail network.
I reckon all of these links are useful in one way or another. Thank you for the compilation in one place and sharing them with the rest of us!. Thanks again.
Deirdre G
Posted by: Philippines property | 11/24/2009 at 22:51