The United States of America could be less fastly fastly and more slowly slowly. We could think small and shift to a new (old) way of growing food and eating and being.
See also: Alice Water’s The Edible Schoolyard, F.T. Marinetti’s The Futurist Cookbook, Edible Schoolyard at PS 216 Brooklyn
A network of function over geometry
Daniel Nairn on Brasilia, specifically on a network of paths showing where human activity was very different from the plan:
This is the network of function over geometry. The paths are trodden out of convenience, but they also gently meander.
In 1961, Lewis Mumford recognized this same tendency when Brasilia was under construction:
[T]he slow curve is the natural line of the footwalker, as anyone can observe as he looks back at his tracks in the snow across an open field.
People were willing to sacrifice aesthetics and even time when it came to choosing their paths. Mumford again:
See also:
The Modernist City, The Oregon Experiment
Organic planning does not begin with a preconceived goal; it moves from need to need, from opportunity to opportunity, in a series of adaptations that themselves become increasingly coherent and purposeful, so that they generate a complex final design, hardly less unified than a pre-formed geometric pattern.
Ethan Hawke narrating the story of The High Line in New York City:
Rail traffic declined on the High Line, and part of it was torn down in the 1960s. The last train ran down the High Line before Thanksgiving in 1980 carrying three boxcarsful of frozen turkeys.
The short film chronicling its history, birds and all, here.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Logo Design, or “Are you going to do the logo and charts for me or not?” [via]
A sense of place is beyond control of a single person:
It is not the designer who creates the sense of place. It is the user or observer. The designer merely sets out opportunities for others to use — to make distinctions, to perceive connections and to take advantage (or not) or the structure or thought that is there.
Donlyn Lyndon goes on to issue a cautionary note, “Places that harbor no secrets whisper that none are allowed,” as if to reserve something for a Secret Payoff.
The art world has historically been a black box for most people, and I really wanted to help people learn about art to learn about what they liked. If we made it ridiculously affordable, then maybe they’d be able to take the leap to see what it’s like to be a collector.
The paradox of the paradox of choice
Ten years ago, conventional wisdom suggested that more choice was bad. Now, it seems that the opposite is true:
[A] more fundamental objection to the “choice is bad” thesis is that the psychological effect may not actually exist at all. It is hard to find much evidence that retailers are ferociously simplifying their offerings in an effort to boost sales. Starbucks boasts about its “87,000 drink combinations”; supermarkets are packed with options. This suggests that “choice demotivates” is not a universal human truth, but an effect that emerges under special circumstances.
Researchers designed experiments to determine when choice demotivates:
[A] curious thing happened almost immediately. They began by trying to replicate some classic experiments – such as the jam study, and a similar one with luxury chocolates. They couldn’t find any sign of the “choice is bad” effect. Neither the original Lepper-Iyengar experiments nor the new study appears to be at fault: the results are just different and we don’t know why.
And so:
The average of all these studies suggests that offering lots of extra choices seems to make no important difference either way.
Ten years later: no important difference.
This vaguely reminds me of what Mark Liberman referred to as Steven Johnson’s “plot plots” and the investigation on complexity in storylines way back in 2005. Maybe we’re just getting used to The Sopranos.
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The possibilities of an aphorism
On the nausea of the novel versus the confines of the essay:
Novels, by contrast, are idiosyncratic, uneven, embarrassing, and quite frequently nausea-inducing — especially if you happen to have written one yourself. Within the confines of an essay or — even better! — an aphorism, you can be the writer you dream of being. No word out of place, no tell-tale weak spots (dialogue, the convincing representation of other people, plot), no absences, no lack. I think it’s the limits of the essay, and of the real, that truly attract fiction writers. In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things — although the thing you’re generally looking into is the self.
And then:
But after you have raged at the impossible artificiality of storytelling, once you have shouted, with Kafka, “But then? No then”, well, maybe you will find yourself returning to the crossroads of “And then, and then”, if only to see what’s going on down there.
[It] requires actual action by actual people in actual space — not the repackaged neomodernism that seems to be cropping up everywhere, a literally redesigned utopia that ignores the social, the political and the very notion of a just city or the right to the city — but one which is capable of taking on the profound and intertwined crises of poverty, injustice and the environment. This requires not a new modernism but a paramodernism, something altered, contrary beyond and alongside what has come before.
In response to “Architect plans massive man-made mountain” – The Architects Journal
Jane Jacobs, chairman of The Committee to Save the West Village, holds up documentary evidence at press conference at Lions Head at Hudson and Charles Streets, 1961. Photograph by Phil Stanziola [Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.]. “We were, everybody was, in on this,” Jacobs said. “Either their second, or their third job, was saving the neighborhood.” [via]
I tell stories about people. Sitting on subways, in airports, or in cafes in new cities, I make up stories about people. I tell stories in part because I imagine others’ lives, but mostly because it helps give context to my own. At times, I take this a bit further, and imagine what it’s like, when I visit a new town, to leave behind where I am and, for a moment, suspend belief about the thing I’m doing. What would it be like to move here, to imagine the people in this place as my future friends and neighbors.
I look at the items on the wall as the topics of many future conversations; the items on the menu as the food of future enjoyable meals with future yet-identified people. John Dewey has said, “recognition is perception arrested before it has a chance to develop freely,” and this close study avoids arrest. So more stories.
With all my optimism for stories and travel, just the opposite is valuable to me: becoming comfortable with one place, so the micro act of becoming a regular has become something of a casual study. When is it that someone moves from the informal visitor to the recognized regular? And how does one maintain regular status?
It appears becoming a regular has some fundamental shared qualities:
See also:
First NY Times restaurant review, circa 1859? – the experience of being a regular has barely changed in 150 years
Being a regular takes time. It’s not something one can pretend. And multiple personalities, schedules, and attention spans (theirs and yours) make it such that simply showing up isn’t enough. Showing up repeatedly, consistently, and memorably to a number of people in one place is crucial, and even then it’s at the intersection of time and value.
Prior to establishing regular status, you can’t let on you have interest in becoming a regular. Being needy is a turnoff. Likewise, acknowledging you’re approaching regular status—even if everyone is aware—is off limits. It’s key that the acknowledgment lie with the establishment, and all you can do is wait.
Like a change of seasons, being called out as a regular is surprising. Even though you knew it was coming, the first day you’re served that double XX with the YY without asking or given the table with a Z, it’s shocking. Try to be unimpressed, yet enormously gracious.
There’s a critical period where you’re training them. Particularly if multiple people are working, you have multiple personalities and memories to deal with. Some will remember your preferences; some will not. Don’t be afraid to correct them, even though your inclination will be to accept whatever they remember in the interest of preserving your new regular status.
See also:
Paul Westerberg – Taking a regular status to excess
By accepting the XX and YY, you walked into a pact that bound you to unspoken rules. It contains items such as not stepping over your boundaries (your friend, for example, cannot also have a Z). And you have to agree that, unless for good reason, you have to do your part, which is to simply show up and be consistent and memorable.
Now that I’m a regular, I just sit here and tell stories about the people passing by. And they’re, most likely, telling stories about me.
the practice comma art comma method comma or system of inserting points or open single quote periods closed single quote to aide the sense comma in writing or printing semicolon division into sentences comma clauses comma etc period by means of points or periods period other punctuation marks comma e period g period exclamation marks comma question marks comma refer to the tone or structure of what precedes them period a sentence can contain any of these symbols comma its termination marked by a period period
One card from Michael Harvey’s White Papers [set of 71 5 x 8 inch index cards (NY: 1971)]
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