Bobulate, for Intentional Organization

Why are these “observation wheels” reaching landmark status in some places when other, more vernacular gestures might better fit the context of a place?

That’s Chuck Wolfe with a fair question as he catalogs five principles for people and place in preparation for a forthcoming book. I’ve puzzled, too, about the observation wheel plans here in NYC.

Yet he defends them gracefully:

My answer is not to cynically decry these wheels, but to consider them as the same exciting, moving observation points first explained by seventeenth century observers. Understanding their ongoing success — premised on fun and excitement — is consistent with my opening call for more studied reflection about relationships of people and the communities around them.

Fair enough. In Bloomberg I trust.

Wayne Curtis on the lost art of the long walk:

[W]hen we move by foot today … it always seem to involve brief, intense tromps motivated by a single purpose. We walk to the garage to get to the car. We walk from the mall parking lot to Best Buy. We walk from Gate 4 to Gate 22 in Terminal B.

Also:

We also seem to be losing our capacity for in-depth walking. Walking is now short-term scanning. Thoreau liked to spend four hours every day rambling, free of tasks and immediate goals. He lamented that his fellow townsmen would recall pleasant walks they’d taken a decade ago, but had “confined themselves to the highway ever since.” “The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of his friend. “If shut up in the house, he did not write at all.”

With respect to long walks, let’s consider the value of the short-term. The shortcut.

Shortcuts are sort of secrets for locals. A shortcut out loud might sound something like, “Oh, to get to the freeway, actually take a right instead of a left. It will be 10 minute shorter.” But a shortcut is never done. Once you’re let in on the shortcut, you want more. You can always save more time. You can always imagine a shorter way. And there probably is.

All secrets are not shortcuts, but all shortcuts are secrets. Perhaps then shortcuts are secret handshakes. Perhaps they’re secret handshakes for a public. A private public.

Consider that un-long walks are not anti-walking, then, but rather pro-shortcut. Pro-secret. Pro-belonging.

Adapted from #LAD05, a package for Quarterly.

Obama, recently, revealed part of his framework for simplifying his decision making process,” namely: same suit, different day. Brian Eno nicely outlines the same as cowboys versus farmers:

Describing his philosophy of studio work, Mr. Eno tries out another big metaphor: cowboys versus farmers. Most of what happens in a recording studio is repetitive monotony, tilling the same soil over and over to make slight improvements — insufferably boring, in his view. Mr. Eno prefers to see himself as a cowboy — or, even better, a prospector — constantly seeking out new territory, never staying in the same place for long.

“In my normal life I’m a very unadventurous person,” Mr. Eno said. “I take the same walk every day and I eat in the same restaurants, and often eat exactly the same things in the same restaurants. I don’t adventure much except when I’m in the studio, and then I only want to adventure. I cannot bear doing something again, or thinking that I’m doing something again.”

Which are you?

Adam Gopnik’s truths about New York:

We can’t make any life in New York without composing a private map of it in our minds.
An actual map of New York recalls our inner map of the city.

Simultaneously [New York is] a map to be learned and a place to aspire to.
A city of things and a city of signs, the place I actually am and the place I would like to be even when I am here.

Even when we are established here, New York somehow still seems a place we aspire to.
We go on being inspired even when we’re most exasperated.

If the energy of New York is the energy of aspiration, the spirit of New York is really the spirit of accommodation.
And yet both shape the city’s maps, for what aspirations and accommodations share is the quality of becoming, of not being fixed in place of being in every way unfinished.

In New York, the space between what you want and what you’ve got creates a civic itchiness.
I don’t know a single content New Yorker.

To make a home in New York, we first have to find a place on the map of the city to make it in.
The map alone teaches us lessons about the kind of home you can make.

[Excerpted and abbreviated from Through the Children’s Gate]

Each summer, she visited New York. “What’s your diary like?” preceded overlapping calendars to find where we might place the visit. And each summer, I drew a map for my guest. Shopping places, seeing places, eating places, finding places, sitting places, secret places. The neighborhood diagrams charted my moves through the city — East Village, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens — and were as unknowable as they were temporary. Each summer, places dissipated into places they used to be. Drawn maps, a history of a moment. The ritual of the map became the truth that persisted.

[Y]ou don’t begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or a masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other.

That’s Annie Dillard in her 1989 book, The Writing Life. In it, she tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student:

“Do you think I could be a writer?” ” ‘Well,’ the writer said, ‘do you like sentences?’ ” The student is surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that “if he liked sentences he could begin,” and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. “I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, ‘I like the smell of paint.’ ”

But:

[W]ouldn’t the equivalent of paint be words rather than sentences? Actually, no, because while you can brush or even drip paint on a canvas and make something interesting happen, just piling up words, one after the other, won’t do much of anything until something else has been added.

Sentence: check. Next: paint.

[thx, Cameron]