Escape vessel? I think so. Now, if only one could power it with good intentions….

Tomás Saraceno’s art explores possible visions of a better world, generating poetic, playful propositions for a human life in balance with the planet. His works occupy the border regions between science, art and architecture. They can include anything from spheres and cloud creations to flying gardens, space elevators and futuristic dwellings. The dream of a weightless state and the possibility of a human being moving freely above the clouds, free of the confines of gravity, and free from national borders, recur in several works. [Source> artfacts.net]

Thank you [deconcrete.org]. For some more [workshop Thomas Saraceno]

They move here, get degrees, have children, garden, and buy SUVs like any other run-of-the-mill suburban resident but in reality, it is really all an elaborate ruse. Look out, your friendly neighbor offering to drive you 6-year-old to soccer practice is actually:

A RUSSIAN SPY!

“Dammit Natasha!” said Boris to his beautiful wife, “you blew our cover.”

Friendly neighbors and comely gardeners leading double lives. The neighbors could hardly believe it:

Neighbors in Montclair, N.J., of the couple who called themselves Richard and Cynthia Murphy were flabbergasted when a team of F.B.I. agents turned up Sunday night and led the couple away in handcuffs. One person who lives nearby called them “suburbia personified.” Others worried about the Murphys’ elementary-age daughters, who were driven away by a family friend.

Jessie Gugigi, 15, said she could not believe the charges, especially against Mrs. Murphy, who was an accomplished gardener.

“They couldn’t have been spies,” Ms. Gugigi said. “Look what she did with the hydrangeas.”

But no need to worry, the US authorities have it all in check. The seven-year investigation finally culminated in a number of arrests for “conspiracy.”

The spies even went so far as to buy homes in order to pose as ordinary Americans:

“We are under an impression that C. views our ownership of the house as a deviation from the original purpose of our mission here,” the New Jersey couple wrote in a coded message. “From our perspective purchase of the house was solely a natural progression of our prolonged stay here. It was a convenient way to solving the housing issue, plus ‘to do as the Romans do’ in a society that values home ownership.”

Even going as far as to educate themselves at American universities to “deepen their false identities.”

Guess planting the titanium flag under the arctic wasn’t enough for the Russians. They are still looking for ways to undermine us over here in the states.

Thank you [nytimes].

The best spots are just behind the Museum of Science and Industry, near 59th Street. While you are in the area, might as well take a walk down 57th and pick up a book or two from one of the book stores to read in the park. The lakefront there ain’t so bad either (but you can’t swim there).

Here are some shots from our recent expedition. Visit Jackson Park.

Manhattan will become taller, bulkier and 30 percent wider, to better display its spaghetti of subway lines. Staten Island, meanwhile, will shrink by half.

I guess that is what happens when the city is forced to prioritize. Since the beginning of time Staten always had to take a back seat to our favorite urban island as well as Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and even New Jersey.

Beginning this June, the MTA will be distributing the new and improved version of their transit bible (aka “The Map) to assist tourists, natives, and bridge-tunnel crowd city people with expanded cartographies of Manhattan that is less clutter and more “user-friendly.”

While it isn’t the most dramatic change, the new map will be the first re-design of the complex underground caverns of the city since 1979, when topographical features such as ferries, parks, neighborhood names, and major streets were first introduced on the map. It has been re-drawn in response to demands for more clarity, thus making sacrifices (like Staten Island) in the name of the greater good.

Since the abstract underground map was introduced for the London Underground designed by Harry Beck in 1931, transit maps have redefined how people envision and move through space in cities throughout the world, making maps and cities more “open and accessible.”

Here is the current NYC transit map (without transit info bubbles):

Other versions of the city have been more abstract like Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 map:

Other designers in the iPhone-App-age have attempted to ameliorate usability and accuracy with the “Kick Map” of NYC transit that is a hybrid of diagrammatic and topographic mapping. This concept enables a simultaneously understand of what is going on below the ground in relation to what is happening above–a concept that map designers believe will enable riders to better orient themselves inside and outside of the subways:

Better communicating the “wiggles” of the subway system is just one of many goals that map designers attempt to cope with. All these maps address the psychological difficulties riders have navigating the expansive 305 square miles of bagels, immigrants, and Yankee fans.

Let’s hope this new map won’t let us down.

3 map comparison:

I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon.

Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state.

Yes it is true. They finally figured out a to criminalize breathing.

Looks like Fallopia has a project on her hands. Send us your address, we’ll send you an i.d. button. Gratis!

It is, indeed, disappointing time to be in this country. Although the Governor of Arizona assures her state that “racial profiling will not be used” to enforce the new law making it a crime to be an undocumented body in her state, one wonders how exactly the police can be trained to enforce a law on paperwork by merely looking at people. I guess immigration profiling must be more ethically just in our system than plain old racial profiling.

I mean, we all know how to spot illegal aliens, don’t we? They run fast and speak in tongues. That is reasonable enough suspicion to demand the proper documentation for living on the Arizona land.

Let’s not forget all those vicious little kids getting an education under the protection of Plyler v Doe. Looks like we need to figure out some way to legislate those criminals-in-the-making as well. We better get on top of making an evacuation plan to get them over to New Mexico or California before they all end up in juvy detention.

So the state of AZ is protecting her innocent, law-abiding citizens from becoming tainted by those criminally-minded, sans papiers that threaten to take over and transform their state into a formidable Gotham City of vice and destitution. Call in the League of Shadows for this one. The question is, who will our Batman be? Perhaps he’ll emerge in the form of the trickster Coyote. Obama?

So what to do in the meantime? Button campaigns and boycotting the state of Arizona?

There’s got to more that we can do.

First it was the banks, now they’re attacking with ash. I think the Icelanders are preparing to invade the UK.

Volcanic Dust Cloud from Iceland, I’m pretty sure, is about the most severe neo-punk, emo-rock, karate kid take-over band name I’ve ever come across.

Rising over the frigid rooftops of Reykjavík and billowing out into a DeLilloesque amorphous mass of expulsion, the invasion is staging a revolution of airspace, colonizing your lungs and pores with its nordic soul grooves, fresh and guaranteed to radiate glacial delight. Don’t be fooled by their lasciviously chill and lingering presence, they will envelope you with their particulate, silicate matter, taking prisoners into their tornado of revenge across the Atlantic and into their icy-gray atmospheres.

Mother Earth is releasing particles into the atmosphere to contribute to global cooling, thus counter-acting the massive release of greenhouse gases by her naughty child, Homo-Colossus. That Homo-Colossus must ground a few gas emitters for a few days makes Homo-Colossus angry, but that is not Mother Earth’s intent. She merely wants to save all of the living creatures on the planet so that Homo-Colossus will have somebody to play with.

Will they have mercy on you?

On May 2, 2010 at exactly 15:00 hours (U.T.C.), the world will…

We don’t know yet. But the New York Times is offering a pretty cool opportunity for us to find out. They’ve extended a global invitation for amateurs and pros alike to take out their cameras, and attempt to “capture this singular instant in whatever way you think would add to a marvelous global mosaic; a Web-built image of one moment in time across the world.” (nytimes.com) Once you have taken your photograph (and they ask that you do it as close to the time as possible!), you then upload the image to the Times link that will go live at 15:00 hours (U.T.C.). This is not a photo competition. EVERY photograph will be hosted on their site for the entire world to see. Still, the LENS blog will highlight their favorite snaps.

” What matters more than technique is the thought behind the picture, because you’ll only be sending us one. So please do think beforehand about where you will want to be and what you will want to focus on. Here are the general topics:

Religion
Play
Nature and the Environment
Family
Work
Arts and Entertainment
Money and the Economy
Community
Social Issues”

Seems pretty inclusive.

The e-party is sponsored by the LENS blog on the New York Times Website. Definitely check it out! Read the official invitation at lens.blogs.nytimes.com

TO FIND OUT WHAT TIME 15:00 hours U.T.C. is for you, you can use this World Clock Converter. Or do the math. : )

It is also that time of the semester where I need to be spending all day in the library just as I’d rather spend all day lounging on my fire escape, or napping under a tree. As a compromise, I’m on a hunt for places in Harlem where I can do my homework, while still fulfilling my wanderlust and craving for spring-ish environments.

Maybe we can get Em to map them for us. (She likes that sort of thing.)
The only requirements were free wi-fi, window seats and a decent cup of Joe.

HARLEM COOL(HOT) COFFEE SPOTS

Cafe One
1619 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY

This little place has about 12 small tables. It was pretty crowded when I stopped in at 1pm on a Tuesday afternoon. It is right near City College, so I can hope the crowd consisted of students, and not just the lavishly unemployed. They had a pretty good pastry spread, and they make simple sandwiches as well. The cafe is clean, bright, and sunny, just like the all-American girls behind the counter. Hours: 9am -9pm daily.

Perks: They make fresh smoothies, and will make you an egg sandwich on a fresh bagel, roll, or croissant ALL DAY. Yay.
Unperks: Crowded, plastic furniture with only a few outlets for laptops

Cafe Veg
2291 Adam Clayton Powell Junior Boulevard, New York, NY

I have walked past this place four times now, and never seen it open. However, someone is updating the sidewalk board outside the shop. It always says different tantalizing things like “Fresh Mango Juice” or “Free vegan cookie with lunch”. It is probably the only place offering vegetarian and vegan snacks for miles. If only I could figure out how to get inside.

Perks: Whoever owns the place has great penmanship, and and eye for color.
Unperks: Unpredictable, irrational hours.

La Pregunta Arts Cafe

1528 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY
http://www.lapregunta.net/

This place presents itself as a sort of sultry intellectual salon, more akin to Chelsea or the East Village than something you would expect to find between a Halal grocer and a locksmith in Harlem. I was sold by the fancy lettering and seductive posters in the windows of the cafe, so I crossed the street to check it out. The place was pretty large, and also pretty empty, save for a long- haired latin man with a ponytail who was eating alone at a table in the middle of the room. He had a napkin tucked into his shirt, and he gave me the slightest, sexiest wink a man with a fork in his mouth could expect to pull off. I didn’t see much art, culture, or life in the place, but it was about 2pm in the middle of the week. I get the feeling this is meant to be more of an after-hours establishment. I’ll certainly go back and check it out sometime, if not just to find out what that man was eating.

Perks: The place has a pretty snazzy website, that boasts an “exotic” salad bar. It also has a REAL bar.
Unperks: There are no events listed on the calendar of events. The cafe may turn out to be little more than a great idea. Though it could be a great place to start your own stimulation-type gathering…

Cafe Muddy Waters
2185 Adam Clayton Powell Jr, New York, NY‎
muddywatersespresso.net‎

If coffee is your number one priority, I would recommend Cafe Muddy Waters at the corner of 129th and 7th Avenue. The place has a great, true-to-Harlem kind of atmosphere, big on the cozy and the community…slow on the service. I had a cappuccino that rivaled any other cup of “coffee” I’ve been served in Harlem. Unless you think Dunkin Donuts is as good as it gets, I’d give this place a shot.

Perks: Full espresso menu and real baristas.
UnPerks: Even though they have free wireless, there is no free electricity! There are no outlets for laptops, and the barista said they didn’t have any plan of adding them. The cafe website greets you with “Happy Thanksgiving!” so I think they’re a little behind in the realm technoculture.

Tea and Things of That Kind
2340 Adam Clayton Powell Jr, New York, NY‎

This is by far my favorite find in Harlem, though I have yet to be an actual customer. I’m saving it for a rainy day, or more accurately- a perfect spring afternoon that I don’t have to rush off or bring in my laptop, and I can sit and sip a cup of tea the way tea was meant to be sipped. This place is pristine and pretty as your grandmothers parlor. Everything is pale and delicate, and hopelessly romantic…even with the tell-tale clear plastic covers on the furniture that lets you know you’re still in Harlem. It reminds me of when my Grammie would have the ladies over after church, and I was only allowed to step and and “have myself a cookie” before being ushered back out of the soft white room. This place is run by a mother/daughter team with high ambitions to bring “health consultations, massage therapy and non-prescription natural path health remedies for individuals in the local community.”

Perks: It is adorable. Sweet in the sweetest sense. And their tea is meant to keep you healthy: body, mind, and spirit.
UnPerks: You probably can’t get your boyfriend to join you there…unless he is very different from my own. Bring a girlfriend and giggle away.

MacArthur Park, Bright Shadows

About 45 minutes till we reach our final destination. Cue Broken Social Scene’s “Pacific Coast Theme.” Memories of the downtown skyline pulling me over the crest of the 10 freeway over West Covina come flooding back to me. So close, yet so far. As we approach the grid begins to light up. Sprawled out for 60 miles in infinite directions, LA begins.

The east coast can get you so uptight. It seems not that long ago that life was easier. What did warm sunlight feel like on my face? Seems like a distant memory after all the snow and gray of February in New York.

I remember LA and I feel movement, a constant pace like waves off the shore. The city moves me back and forth. The hot Santa Ana winds–the thick air. Was it really that long ago? Do you remember me, Lost Angeles?  Did I leave a trace on your surfaces? Do you remember my routes? Up and down the 110 everyday with ease, but sometimes impatiently through millions of anxious cars waiting below the elevated carpool lanes.

Days in Wilmington, Port of LA

I remember the way the 10 east felt like the first time. Vermont at the 110 on ramp. My car was bouncing on the waves of pavement that sculpted the road. I thought my car was going to break down and I was afraid–there was nowhere to go. Perhaps I did break down, in a sense. I could not have imagined feeling this kind of nostalgia at that moment. I used to be overwhelmed by the thought of living in California, now I’m taken aback by how the landscapes became a part of me, something to be missed terribly on the other coast.

At least the sun still shines in the summertime. I’ll be yours, if you’ll be mine. And Los Angeles, I most certainly am yours.

I know these dark shadows and corridors of light as intimately as the lovers I walked down these long avenues with long ago. It is like coming home again, coming back to LA. I long to drive along the top edges of the canyons and find my way back down, far down, below the surfaces of overpasses, steel and glass. I lived through vistas and valleys the city, and it still lingers in me.

I’ve never felt so lonely or so alive as I have when I’m caught up and lost in LA. I long to feel the wayward, relinquishing myself to the touch-and-go ways of your apocalyptic weather and ghost-like streetwalkers. The city’s edges, centers, and in-betweens are endless sources of frustration, exploration, fear, and magic.

LA glows with an incandescence out of the old Hollywood films. I miss the old scenes and what it felt like to bask in that light.

Downtown, Passing By

Excerpt from Joan Didion’s essay, Santa Ana Winds

Exposition Park, Globe Watching

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension.  What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point.  For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night.  I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too.  We know it because we feel it.  The baby frets.  The maid sulks.  I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air.  To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew.  I could see why.  The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf.  The heat was surreal.  The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called “earthquake weather.”  My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete.  One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.

“On nights like that,” Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, “every booze party ends in a fight.  Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.  Anything can happen.”  That was the kind of wind it was.  I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom.  The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushers through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel.  There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best know of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics:  it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind.  Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about “nervousness,” about “depression.”

Maryland St, Rooftop et Dos X

In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable.  In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime.  Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn.  A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions.  No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances.  In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy.  One cannot get much more mechanistic than that.

Easterners commonly complain that there is no “weather” at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland.  That is quite misleading.  In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes:  two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire.  At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines.  The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964.  In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains.

Just to watch the front-page news out of Los Angeles during a Santa Ana is to get very close to what it is about the place.  The longest single Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957, and it lasted not the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November 21 until December 4.  On the first day 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles an hour.  In town, the wind reached Force 12, or hurricane force, on the Beaufort Scale; oil derricks were toppled and people ordered off the downtown streets to avoid injury from flying objects.  On November 22 the fire in the San Gabriels was out of control.  On November 24 six people were killed in automobile accidents, and by the end of the week the Los Angeles Times was keeping a box score of traffic deaths.  On November 26 a prominent Pasadena attorney, depressed about money, shot and killed his wife, their two sons and himself.  On November 27 a South Gate divorcée, twenty-two, was murdered and thrown from a moving car.  On November 30 the San Gabriel fire was still out of control, and the wind in town was blowing eighty miles an hour.  On the first day of December four people died violently, and on the third the wind began to break.

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination.  The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.  Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires.  For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.  Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability.  The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.

Westside, Fire in the Sky

“(T)heories of cultural transmission do not fully account for

how culture is learned by active and inventive individuals.

People do not learn all that culture presents to them, and

different individuals do not learn in the same way. [...]

(P)eople construct various meanings about [art] that are

connected to their sociocultural experiences. Because people’s

lives are diverse and complex — they live in multiple cultures,

different people can construct many different kinds of

meaning.”

JoEllen Fisherkeller, Everyday Learning About Identities