Tuesday, June 5, 2012
There She Blew
The history of American whaling.
If, under the spell of “Moby-Dick,” you decided to run away to the modern equivalent of whaling, where would you go? Because petroleum displaced whale oil as a source of light and lubrication more than a century ago, it might seem logical to join workers in Arabian oil fields or on drilling platforms at sea. On the other hand, firemen, like whalers, are united by their care for one another and for the vehicle that bears them, and the fireman’s alacrity with ladders and hoses resembles the whaler’s with masts and ropes. Then, there are the armed forces, which, like a nineteenth-century whaleship, can take you around the world in the company of people from ethnic and social backgrounds unfamiliar to you. All these lines of work are dangerous but indispensable, as whaling once was, but none seem perfectly analogous. Ultimately, there is nothing like rowing a little boat up to a sixty-ton mammal that swims, stabbing it, and hoping that it dies a relatively well-mannered death.
Nor is there anything like skinning the whale’s penis, “longer than a Kentuckian is tall,” and wearing it as a tunic while you slice up the fat harvested from the rest of its body. Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, claims that the mincer of blubber usually wore such a tunic, in a clerical cut that made him look like “a candidate for an archbishoprick.” For “Moby-Dick,” Melville drew on scientific, historical, and journalistic accounts of whales, but he had a reputation for blurring the line between fact and fiction, and scholars have noted that for this chapter “none of Melville’s fish documents was particularly helpful.” In other words, he may have made the tunic up, for the sake of the archiepiscopal pun and perhaps, too, as a symbol. In another chapter long suspected of symbolism, Ishmael falls into ecstasy while squeezing the lumps out of spermaceti freshly bailed from the head of a sperm whale: “I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.” But, fanciful as it sounds, sperm-squeezing is attested to by another source. In an 1874 memoir, the whaler William M. Davis recalled how “luxurious” it was to wade into pots of sperm and “squeeze and strain out the fibres,” which would darken the oil unless they were removed, and added that, in the rich bath, “I almost fell in love with the touch of my own poor legs.”
It is difficult to follow in Melville’s footsteps if you can’t tell when he’s fibbing, but there is no shortage of whaling histories for a Melville aficionado to turn to. (“Though of real knowledge there be little,” Melville wrote, “yet of books there are a plenty.”) In the latest, “Leviathan” (Norton; $27.95), Eric Jay Dolin offers a pleasantly anecdotal history of American whaling so comprehensive that he seems to have harpooned at least one fact from every cetacean text ever printed. “Leviathan” is a gentle book about a brutal industry. By ending his story when America stopped whaling, Dolin omits the most gruesome years of international whaling history, when new technology increased killing capacity approximately tenfold. He presents whaling in a more innocent age, when it was the fifth-largest industry in America and a source of national pride—in the time before ecology, as well as before steamships, as it were.
It’s hard to say who qualifies as the first American whaler. The Inuit hunted whales in the Canadian Arctic a thousand years ago, but Dolin isn’t convinced that anyone in what is now the United States did so before Europeans arrived. Basque whale hunters reached Labrador in the sixteenth century, and in 1614 John Smith, unable to return to his beloved Virginia, tried to catch whales near what is now Maine. (They got away.) The day after the Pilgrims signed their 1620 compact, whales surrounded the Mayflower, but the Pilgrims lacked whale-catching equipment, and Dolin suspects that they lit their lamps with oil from dead whales they found on the beach. The first to hunt whales and actually catch them in waters that today belong to the United States were the Dutch, off the coast of Delaware, in the sixteen-thirties. The vagueness of this prehistory says a lot about Colonial America, which had few clear political borders, but even more about whaling, which throughout its history has tended to defy them. “In whaling the natural resource (the stock of whales) was owned by no one,” the economists Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, and Karin Gleiter noted in a definitive 1997 analysis of the industry. One theme to emerge from Dolin’s book is the oblique angle the history of whaling forms with political history. To whalers, nation-states were usually irrelevant and sometimes a hazard.
Once a whale washed ashore, of course, it was bound to end up as someone’s property, and whales entered early American law through the question of who owned them when they did. On Long Island, a town’s householders divvied up the oil among themselves, after paying a few shillings to the finder and something to the butcher, and sometimes surrendering the fins and flukes to local Indians for ceremonial use. In Massachusetts, Plymouth Colony taxed towns by taking a barrel of oil from every drift whale. In the sixteen-forties and fifties, colonists began to sail a few miles to kill whales spotted from shore, and, not long afterward, Colonial governments were demanding a share of the profits from these whales, too.
Serious money was at stake. When two shallops of Rhode Islanders towed home a right whale in 1662, a contemporary commented that “they had earned more than a whole farm would bring us in an entire year.” Besides oil, right whales contained baleen, a fibrous and feathery tissue in their mouths, which is probably responsible for the “strange, grassy, cutting sound” that Ishmael hears as he watches them feed. Flexible when heated, baleen, also known as whalebone, kept whatever shape it was cooled into, like plastic. It was used primarily in corsets, fashionable from the sixteenth century to the dawn of the twentieth, but it could be molded into items as various as umbrella ribs, fishing rods, and shoehorns.
by Caleb Crain, The New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration: Jacques De Loustal
If, under the spell of “Moby-Dick,” you decided to run away to the modern equivalent of whaling, where would you go? Because petroleum displaced whale oil as a source of light and lubrication more than a century ago, it might seem logical to join workers in Arabian oil fields or on drilling platforms at sea. On the other hand, firemen, like whalers, are united by their care for one another and for the vehicle that bears them, and the fireman’s alacrity with ladders and hoses resembles the whaler’s with masts and ropes. Then, there are the armed forces, which, like a nineteenth-century whaleship, can take you around the world in the company of people from ethnic and social backgrounds unfamiliar to you. All these lines of work are dangerous but indispensable, as whaling once was, but none seem perfectly analogous. Ultimately, there is nothing like rowing a little boat up to a sixty-ton mammal that swims, stabbing it, and hoping that it dies a relatively well-mannered death.
Nor is there anything like skinning the whale’s penis, “longer than a Kentuckian is tall,” and wearing it as a tunic while you slice up the fat harvested from the rest of its body. Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, claims that the mincer of blubber usually wore such a tunic, in a clerical cut that made him look like “a candidate for an archbishoprick.” For “Moby-Dick,” Melville drew on scientific, historical, and journalistic accounts of whales, but he had a reputation for blurring the line between fact and fiction, and scholars have noted that for this chapter “none of Melville’s fish documents was particularly helpful.” In other words, he may have made the tunic up, for the sake of the archiepiscopal pun and perhaps, too, as a symbol. In another chapter long suspected of symbolism, Ishmael falls into ecstasy while squeezing the lumps out of spermaceti freshly bailed from the head of a sperm whale: “I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.” But, fanciful as it sounds, sperm-squeezing is attested to by another source. In an 1874 memoir, the whaler William M. Davis recalled how “luxurious” it was to wade into pots of sperm and “squeeze and strain out the fibres,” which would darken the oil unless they were removed, and added that, in the rich bath, “I almost fell in love with the touch of my own poor legs.”
It is difficult to follow in Melville’s footsteps if you can’t tell when he’s fibbing, but there is no shortage of whaling histories for a Melville aficionado to turn to. (“Though of real knowledge there be little,” Melville wrote, “yet of books there are a plenty.”) In the latest, “Leviathan” (Norton; $27.95), Eric Jay Dolin offers a pleasantly anecdotal history of American whaling so comprehensive that he seems to have harpooned at least one fact from every cetacean text ever printed. “Leviathan” is a gentle book about a brutal industry. By ending his story when America stopped whaling, Dolin omits the most gruesome years of international whaling history, when new technology increased killing capacity approximately tenfold. He presents whaling in a more innocent age, when it was the fifth-largest industry in America and a source of national pride—in the time before ecology, as well as before steamships, as it were.
It’s hard to say who qualifies as the first American whaler. The Inuit hunted whales in the Canadian Arctic a thousand years ago, but Dolin isn’t convinced that anyone in what is now the United States did so before Europeans arrived. Basque whale hunters reached Labrador in the sixteenth century, and in 1614 John Smith, unable to return to his beloved Virginia, tried to catch whales near what is now Maine. (They got away.) The day after the Pilgrims signed their 1620 compact, whales surrounded the Mayflower, but the Pilgrims lacked whale-catching equipment, and Dolin suspects that they lit their lamps with oil from dead whales they found on the beach. The first to hunt whales and actually catch them in waters that today belong to the United States were the Dutch, off the coast of Delaware, in the sixteen-thirties. The vagueness of this prehistory says a lot about Colonial America, which had few clear political borders, but even more about whaling, which throughout its history has tended to defy them. “In whaling the natural resource (the stock of whales) was owned by no one,” the economists Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, and Karin Gleiter noted in a definitive 1997 analysis of the industry. One theme to emerge from Dolin’s book is the oblique angle the history of whaling forms with political history. To whalers, nation-states were usually irrelevant and sometimes a hazard.
Once a whale washed ashore, of course, it was bound to end up as someone’s property, and whales entered early American law through the question of who owned them when they did. On Long Island, a town’s householders divvied up the oil among themselves, after paying a few shillings to the finder and something to the butcher, and sometimes surrendering the fins and flukes to local Indians for ceremonial use. In Massachusetts, Plymouth Colony taxed towns by taking a barrel of oil from every drift whale. In the sixteen-forties and fifties, colonists began to sail a few miles to kill whales spotted from shore, and, not long afterward, Colonial governments were demanding a share of the profits from these whales, too.
Serious money was at stake. When two shallops of Rhode Islanders towed home a right whale in 1662, a contemporary commented that “they had earned more than a whole farm would bring us in an entire year.” Besides oil, right whales contained baleen, a fibrous and feathery tissue in their mouths, which is probably responsible for the “strange, grassy, cutting sound” that Ishmael hears as he watches them feed. Flexible when heated, baleen, also known as whalebone, kept whatever shape it was cooled into, like plastic. It was used primarily in corsets, fashionable from the sixteenth century to the dawn of the twentieth, but it could be molded into items as various as umbrella ribs, fishing rods, and shoehorns.
by Caleb Crain, The New Yorker | Read more:
Illustration: Jacques De Loustal
Are We Losing San Francisco?
[ed. See also: Can Mom and Pop Shops Survive Extreme Gentrification?]
Twitter moves into its new headquarters in downtown San Francisco this month, it will occupy three floors of an 11-story 1937 Art Deco building that has sat shuttered for five years. Outside, its blue bird logo will replace the former main tenant’s sign, whose analog clocks remain frozen at 9:18, 4:33 and other times past.
Far from Silicon Valley’s self-enclosed campuses, Twitter and other tech start-ups are gravitating to an urban core here that has defied development for decades. Its soon-to-be neighbors include liquor stores, check-cashing stores and discount hotels.
At the Ironwok Japanese and Chinese restaurant, whose half-torn storefront banner flapped in the wind on a recent afternoon, the owners were waiting for Twitter with the same mixture of expectation and trepidation shared by much of the city toward the second tech boom in a little over a decade.
“Of course, Twitter is good for the city, but how about me?” said the owner, Jenny Liu, 41, explaining that her landlord was raising her monthly rent to $12,000 from $8,000.
Even more than the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, this boom could transform the fabric of the city.
This time, Twitter, Zynga, Yelp and other social network companies favored by venture capitalists have made San Francisco their home, creating jobs and raising commercial rents. At the same time, a growing number of young Silicon Valley workers, drawn by San Francisco’s urban charms, are also moving into the city as commuters and further raising rents.
In a city often regarded as unfriendly to business, Mayor Edwin M. Lee, elected last year with the tech industry’s strong backing, has aggressively courted start-ups.
But this boom has also raised fears about the tech industry’s growing political clout and its spillover economic effects. Apartment rents have soared to record highs as affordable housing advocates warn that a new wave of gentrification will price middle-class residents out of the city. At risk, many say, are the very qualities that have drawn generations of outsiders here, like the city’s diversity and creativity. Families, black residents, artists and others will increasingly be forced across the bridge to Oakland, they warn.
“Is Oakland Cooler Than San Francisco?” The San Francisco Bay Guardian captured the prevailing angst on a recent cover.
Kenneth Rosen, an economist and expert on real estate at the University of California, Berkeley, said that the boom was starting to hurt the “poor and middle class” but that it would benefit the “upper middle class.” Its full impact will not be felt for another couple of years, he said, adding, “We are early on in this boom.”
by Norimitsu Onishi, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Monday, June 4, 2012
The Little 747 Who Dared to Dream
Do they still make children's books with sad endings? Like The Velveteen Rabbit? Because I think I've got a doozy here.
It's all about a 747 who loves to fly. It's what she was built to do and it's what she does best. For years, she soars through the skies, ferrying cargo and, possibly, some nondescript men in nice suits. (Or maybe not. Depends on when she went into service.) But through it all, the little 747 just wants to spend as much time as she can aloft, among the clouds, where she belongs.
But then, one day, the nondescript men in nice suits tell her that it's time she retire. They take her to a place in the desert and leave her there, with lots of other retired planes who've given up and are slowly falling apart. Other men come and they take her engines. Then they take all the beautiful buttons and switches from cockpit. The other planes tell her that, soon, men will come with saws to cut away parts of her fuselage. But the little 747 never breaks. They can take her apart, bit by bit, but they can't take away her dreams. And still, sometimes, in the boneyard, she tries to take to the skies just one last time.
Seriously. Somebody call the Newberry committee.
And bring me a hanky.
by Maggie Koerth-Baker, Boing Boing
Real Cool
One of the more memorable encounters in the history of modern art occurred late in 1961 when the period’s preeminent avant-garde dealer, Leo Castelli, paid a call at the Upper East Side Manhattan townhouse-cum-studio of Andy Warhol, whose pioneering Pop paintings based on cartoon characters including Dick Tracy, the Little King, Nancy, Popeye, and Superman had caught the eye of Castelli’s gallery director, Ivan Karp, who in turn urged his boss to go have a look for himself. Warhol, eager to make the difficult leap from commercial artist to “serious” painter, decades later recalled his crushing disappointment when Castelli coolly told him, “Well, it’s unfortunate, the timing, because I just took on Roy Lichtenstein, and the two of you in the same gallery would collide.”
Although Lichtenstein, then a thirty-eight-year-old assistant art professor at Rutgers University’s Douglass College in New Jersey, was also making pictures based on comic-book prototypes—an example of wholly independent multiple discovery not unlike such scientific findings as calculus, oxygen, photography, and evolution—he and Warhol were in fact doing quite different things with similar source material, as the divergent tangents of their later careers would amply demonstrate. By 1964, Castelli recognized his mistake and added the thwarted aspirant to his gallery roster, though not before Warhol forswore cartoon imagery, fearful of seeming to imitate Lichtenstein, of whom he always remained somewhat in awe.
In fact, what Lichtenstein and his five-years-younger contemporary Warhol had most in common was being the foremost exemplars of Cool among their generation of American visual artists. The first half of the 1960s was the apogee of what might be termed the Age of Cool—as defined by that quality of being simultaneously with-it and disengaged, in control but nonchalant, knowing but ironically self-aware, and above all inscrutably undemonstrative.
Coolness (which was largely but not exclusively a male attribute) suffused American culture back then, from our supremely compartmentalized commander in chief, John Kennedy, to the action-movie star Steve McQueen, nicknamed “The King of Cool,” and from the middle-class cool of the TV talk-show host Johnny Carson to the far-out jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, whose LP album Birth of the Cool could serve as the soundtrack for that brief interlude before things suddenly turned hot toward the end of the Sixties. Coolness even had its own philosopher-theoretician, Marshall McLuhan, whose influential treatise Understanding Media (1964) codified comic books and television as “cool” means of communication.
Today, a quarter-century after Warhol’s death and fifteen years after Lichtenstein’s (in a hideous coincidence, both unexpectedly succumbed after what had been deemed routine hospital procedures), they remain the two Pop artists best known to the general public, if only in the most simplistic terms, with Warhol as the Campbell’s Soup guy and Lichtenstein as the cartoon guy. A pair of exhibitions that nearly overlapped this spring—a major one on Lichtenstein now at the Art Institute of Chicago before it travels internationally and a numerically comparable but physically more compact one on Warhol at the McNay Museum in San Antonio that was seen only there—offer telling contrasts between these two consummately cool customers.
by Martin Filler, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Illusration: Roy Lichtenstein: Brushstroke with Spatter, 1966. Art Institute of Chicago
WTF in China
My tour guide at the Great Wall of China, Leo, looked at my iPhone and asked, "4S?" I replied yes and he bemoaned the fact that his was only an iPhone 4. By the way, you can get great 3G phone reception at the Great Wall. The Pudong area in Shanghai, which was all farmland 20 years ago, is now adding fantastical skyscrapers so quickly that, when I left for a week to go to Beijing, I thought buildings would pop up while I was away.
There is restricted access to the Internet in China, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be and clearly the barriers are pretty easy to work around. Leo asked if I'd like to be his Facebook friend and told me he'd friend me when he got home and could get on the VPN that went around the country's firewall.
But in ways that I wasn't expecting, China was as foreign and incomprehensible as anywhere I've ever been in my life. In the roughly 5 weeks (on and off) that I was there, I had more truly inexplicable encounters and conversations than in the rest of my life put together. My colleague Diana and I coined a phrase, WTF in China (WTFIC). We'd say this to each other every time there was really nothing else to say because words failed us.
One day in Beijing, we were sitting in a taxi in heavy traffic. We noticed a few vendors going between the cars selling mobile phone car chargers. This seemed like a clever idea. Then Diana noticed that each vendor had chargers in one hand and a live turtle in the other. What was the deal with the turtles? Were they selling them? Were they a marketing gimmick? We emailed Leo, who had offered to help us post-tour with any questions. Before I got his reply back, I said to Diana, "you know, even once he answers us, we're not going to be any more illuminated. I just know it's going to be a WTF in China issue." And indeed, this was Leo's answer, "For turtles, they are the symbol of longevity and fortune, so people may buy when they get bored in traffic!" Clearly, this answer made perfect logical sense to Leo. And to all the people sitting in rush hour traffic jams making a spur of the moment purchase of an animal that would probably outlive them.
And talking of driving in China…sometimes driving down the road, it was very hard to tell the difference between "something major has happened" and just the normal everyday chaos. Every day I felt like I took my life in my hands just getting a taxi to the office. Every taxi driver drives insanely fast and wildly, honking his horn even if there are no other cars on the road. It turns out that most of the Shanghai taxi drivers are living and working there illegally from other provinces and none of them seem to know how to get to almost anywhere in Shanghai. I became conversant in enough Mandarin to communicate and direct them to my office and back to my apartment building because this seemed to be a survival tactic.
When I was able to move beyond my fear for my life on these car rides and ones in Beijing, I noticed that cars often stopped, seemingly in the middle of the road or lined up on the hard shoulder, particularly at the weekend. This never helped the terrible traffic congestion. We asked Leo what that was all about. He told us that driving is a pretty new phenomenon for most people in Shanghai and Beijing and they see it as a social activity. When they go out for the day, they want to drive along with their friends. So they'll park in the meridian or by the side of the road to wait for them to catch up. Given that they all have cell phones, I'm not sure why they can't just track each other via GPS or phone and say, "where are you?" But again, this seemed a perfectly reasonable activity to Leo.
by Sarah Firisen, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:
Expert Issues a Cyberwar Warning
[ed. See also: Why Antivirus Companies Like Mine Failed to Catch Flame and Stuxnet]
When Eugene Kaspersky, the founder of Europe’s largest antivirus company, discovered the Flame virus that is afflicting computers in Iran and the Middle East, he recognized it as a technologically sophisticated virus that only a government could create.
He also recognized that the virus, which he compares to the Stuxnet virus built by programmers employed by the United States and Israel, adds weight to his warnings of the grave dangers posed by governments that manufacture and release viruses on the Internet.
“Cyberweapons are the most dangerous innovation of this century,” he told a gathering of technology company executives, called the CeBIT conference, last month in Sydney, Australia. While the United States and Israel are using the weapons to slow the nuclear bomb-making abilities of Iran, they could also be used to disrupt power grids and financial systems or even wreak havoc with military defenses.
Computer security companies have for years used their discovery of a new virus or worm to call attention to themselves and win more business from companies seeking computer protection. Mr. Kaspersky, a Russian computer security expert, and his company, Kaspersky Lab, are no different in that regard. But he is also using his company’s integral role in exposing or decrypting three computer viruses apparently intended to slow or halt Iran’s nuclear program to argue for an international treaty banning computer warfare.
A growing array of nations and other entities are using online weapons, he says, because they are “thousands of times cheaper” than conventional armaments.
While antivirus companies might catch some, he says, only an international treaty that would ban militaries and spy agencies from making viruses will truly solve the problem.
The wide disclosure of the details of the Flame virus by Kaspersky Lab also seems intended to promote the Russian call for a ban on cyberweapons like those that blocked poison gas or expanding bullets from the armies of major nations and other entities.
by Andrew E. Kramer and Nicole Perlroth, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Alexey Sazonov/Agence France-Presse - Getty Image
When Eugene Kaspersky, the founder of Europe’s largest antivirus company, discovered the Flame virus that is afflicting computers in Iran and the Middle East, he recognized it as a technologically sophisticated virus that only a government could create.
He also recognized that the virus, which he compares to the Stuxnet virus built by programmers employed by the United States and Israel, adds weight to his warnings of the grave dangers posed by governments that manufacture and release viruses on the Internet. “Cyberweapons are the most dangerous innovation of this century,” he told a gathering of technology company executives, called the CeBIT conference, last month in Sydney, Australia. While the United States and Israel are using the weapons to slow the nuclear bomb-making abilities of Iran, they could also be used to disrupt power grids and financial systems or even wreak havoc with military defenses.
Computer security companies have for years used their discovery of a new virus or worm to call attention to themselves and win more business from companies seeking computer protection. Mr. Kaspersky, a Russian computer security expert, and his company, Kaspersky Lab, are no different in that regard. But he is also using his company’s integral role in exposing or decrypting three computer viruses apparently intended to slow or halt Iran’s nuclear program to argue for an international treaty banning computer warfare.
A growing array of nations and other entities are using online weapons, he says, because they are “thousands of times cheaper” than conventional armaments.
While antivirus companies might catch some, he says, only an international treaty that would ban militaries and spy agencies from making viruses will truly solve the problem.
The wide disclosure of the details of the Flame virus by Kaspersky Lab also seems intended to promote the Russian call for a ban on cyberweapons like those that blocked poison gas or expanding bullets from the armies of major nations and other entities.
by Andrew E. Kramer and Nicole Perlroth, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Alexey Sazonov/Agence France-Presse - Getty Image
In Praise of (Loud, Stinky) Bars
The vaunted “third space” isn’t home, and isn’t work—it’s more like the living room of society at large. It’s a place where you are neither family nor co-worker, and yet where the values, interests, gossip, complaints and inspirations of these two other spheres intersect. It’s a place at least one step removed from the structures of work and home, more random, and yet familiar enough to breed a sense of identity and connection. It’s a place of both possibility and comfort, where the unexpected and the mundane transcend and mingle.
And nine times out of ten, it’s a bar.
So, a little story: Once upon a time there was a scruffy real estate developer who shall go nameless, who made some prudent purchases in a derelict former industrial neighborhood. He had a dream to turn that neighborhood into a vibrant new community that attracted talented young professionals willing to pay at least $1,000 per square foot to live there. But times were hard and everyone thought he was nuts. Now, the developer had three things going for him: time, empty space, and a son who was actively dating. The son would come home from a date and say, “Pops, you know that empty storefront down the side street by the pier? Can my girlfriend turn that into a welding shop?” And poof! A rent-free welding shop would appear. Soon the area was populated with ex-girlfriends running quirky artisanal industries, but still times were tough and the talented young professionals would not come.
Then one day the son came home and said, “Hey Pops, my girlfriend wants to open a bar.” The father considered this gravely, but finally agreed. Bars were stinky and noisy and they sold liquor. But they also attracted people and besides the place was just sitting empty now anyway. The bar was opened, and lo and behold it became a Third Space: a place where poor young hipsters could go and hang their weary heads over cheap beer after a long day of yarn bombing, and also where the local shipping company guys enjoyed the jukebox. Before you knew it, alcohol was flowing freely, and the new locals and old locals were conspiring to illegally convert lofts into residential units and open food co-ops. It wasn’t long before the bar started serving food, and then one day the unthinkable happened – it opened a café next door with really good coffee and quirky flavors of scones….
Look, I’m not telling this story to glorify bars as the ultimate third space intervention – I’m just trying to point out that bars occupy are particular niche in the place-making ecosystem. They are like the prairie grass after the fire: preparing the way for the scrub, and ending with the deciduous trees and their variegated canopy. They are hardy pioneers, taking root where not much else can sustain life.
Wait, was that metaphor too much? Yes, definitely.
But it’s also the point: we shouldn’t romanticize third spaces as only being about brightly lit cafes, pedestrianized streets, and the local public library. Bars work in their scruffy way by offering a place to get away from an overcrowded apartment or a squalid loft or a grimy job. They are a place where someone with little to spare can go for a change of pace, and in many edgy neighborhoods those folks are overwhelmingly low-income, and many are also young. These are the bright young things who do the hard work of place-making, but they aren’t necessarily looking for “vibrancy.” It’s more likely they want cheap beer, a decent burger, and a friendly face.
The goal of a bar patron is to enjoy the primary benefit of any decent third space: a place to linger. I’m still looking for someone to generate a “lingering index” so that we can measure the impact of just plain old hanging out – but that’s really at the heart of place-making, and we shouldn’t forget it.
Place-making is thirsty work, so bottom’s up in praise of bars and the Third Space promise they hold.
by Michael Hickey, Rooflines
Photo: Bree Bailey via Creative Commons, CC BY-SA
And nine times out of ten, it’s a bar. So, a little story: Once upon a time there was a scruffy real estate developer who shall go nameless, who made some prudent purchases in a derelict former industrial neighborhood. He had a dream to turn that neighborhood into a vibrant new community that attracted talented young professionals willing to pay at least $1,000 per square foot to live there. But times were hard and everyone thought he was nuts. Now, the developer had three things going for him: time, empty space, and a son who was actively dating. The son would come home from a date and say, “Pops, you know that empty storefront down the side street by the pier? Can my girlfriend turn that into a welding shop?” And poof! A rent-free welding shop would appear. Soon the area was populated with ex-girlfriends running quirky artisanal industries, but still times were tough and the talented young professionals would not come.
Then one day the son came home and said, “Hey Pops, my girlfriend wants to open a bar.” The father considered this gravely, but finally agreed. Bars were stinky and noisy and they sold liquor. But they also attracted people and besides the place was just sitting empty now anyway. The bar was opened, and lo and behold it became a Third Space: a place where poor young hipsters could go and hang their weary heads over cheap beer after a long day of yarn bombing, and also where the local shipping company guys enjoyed the jukebox. Before you knew it, alcohol was flowing freely, and the new locals and old locals were conspiring to illegally convert lofts into residential units and open food co-ops. It wasn’t long before the bar started serving food, and then one day the unthinkable happened – it opened a café next door with really good coffee and quirky flavors of scones….
Look, I’m not telling this story to glorify bars as the ultimate third space intervention – I’m just trying to point out that bars occupy are particular niche in the place-making ecosystem. They are like the prairie grass after the fire: preparing the way for the scrub, and ending with the deciduous trees and their variegated canopy. They are hardy pioneers, taking root where not much else can sustain life.
Wait, was that metaphor too much? Yes, definitely.
But it’s also the point: we shouldn’t romanticize third spaces as only being about brightly lit cafes, pedestrianized streets, and the local public library. Bars work in their scruffy way by offering a place to get away from an overcrowded apartment or a squalid loft or a grimy job. They are a place where someone with little to spare can go for a change of pace, and in many edgy neighborhoods those folks are overwhelmingly low-income, and many are also young. These are the bright young things who do the hard work of place-making, but they aren’t necessarily looking for “vibrancy.” It’s more likely they want cheap beer, a decent burger, and a friendly face.
The goal of a bar patron is to enjoy the primary benefit of any decent third space: a place to linger. I’m still looking for someone to generate a “lingering index” so that we can measure the impact of just plain old hanging out – but that’s really at the heart of place-making, and we shouldn’t forget it.
Place-making is thirsty work, so bottom’s up in praise of bars and the Third Space promise they hold.
by Michael Hickey, Rooflines
Photo: Bree Bailey via Creative Commons, CC BY-SA
Moonrise Kingdom
But this is only peripherally the story of Walt and Laura, or of their three young sons. Rather, it is the tale of their "difficult" eldest child, 12-year-old Suzy (Kara Hayward) and another young misfit with whom she—there really is no better word for it—elopes. This would be Sam (Jared Gilman), a serious, bespectacled, and unpopular boy who fell in love with Suzy the prior year, when he saw her playing the raven in a summer production of Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde. (It is one of several references to the composer in the film.)
Sam goes AWOL from his troop of Khaki Scouts at nearby Camp Ivanhoe to rendezvous with Suzy. United, the two disappear into the wooded thickets of New Penzance Island—the name itself is worth the price of admission—Suzy with her binoculars and pastel suitcases and battery-powered record player; Sam with his coonskin cap and corncob pipe and abundance of camping gear. There, in the dappled forests and sunswept coves, the two young runaways discover freedom, and companionship, and the early, innocent rumblings of sex. As they follow their trail of pseudo-maturity, they are of course sought after by an escalatingly (and understandably) frantic brigade of adults: Suzy's parents, the local police captain (Bruce Willis), and Sam's scoutmaster (Edward Norton). As this last informs the young scouts he's dragooned into the hunt: "This is not just a rescue party. This is a great scouting opportunity."
The book is awash with echoes of children's adventure fiction, from Tom Sawyer to Treasure Island to A High Wind in Jamaica. Underage though they may be, the kids are resourceful, optimistic, capable of loyalty and love—all the qualities with which their elders struggle. It's worth noting that this is the rare tale set in 1965 in which most of the adults are single, and the one marriage to which we are introduced is an unhappy one. (Well, the one legally binding marriage: I should cite here a hilarious cameo by Jason Schwartzman as a renegade scoutmaster with a weakness for performing age-inappropriate matrimonies.)
Moonrise Kingdom is touching, bittersweet, and very, very funny. Cinematographer Robert Yeoman, Anderson's usual collaborator, evokes the the feel of New England (the film was shot in Rhode Island) so precisely that the story's locale need never be mentioned. And the script, by Anderson with Roman Coppola, captures the indolent yet enterprising texture of childhood summers, the sense of having a limited amount of time in which to do unlimited things. The performances are excellent across the board, from the adults who recognize that their best is never quite good enough, to the kids who realize they will be forced to make up the deficit. On the former side, Norton and (particularly) Willis are standouts; on the latter, newcomer Gilman, as Sam, offers a portrait of a boy trying to will himself into premature manhood so indelible that it can almost almost compete with (then-newcomer) Schwartzman's Max Fischer in Rushmore.
by Christopher Orr, The Atlantic | Read more:
Illustration: “Moonrise Kingdom” by Adrian Tomine for The New Yorker. via
Sunday, June 3, 2012
You Are Not a Curator
"Curation is replacing creation as a mode of self-expression." - Jonathan Harris
As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I'm fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in a practice of curation. Call it what you like: aggregating? Blogging? Choosing? Copyright infringing sometimes? But it's not actually curation, or anything like it. Your faux TED talk is not going well for you if you are making some point about "curation" replacing "creation" because, well, for starters, "curation" is choosing among things that are created? So like there's nothing for you to curate without creation? This precious bit of dressing-up what people choose to share on the Internet is, sure, silly, but it's also a way for bloggers to distance themselves from the dirty blogging masses. You are no different from some teen in Indiana with a LiveJournal about cutting. Sorry folks! You're in this nasty fray with the rest of us. And your metaphor is all wrong. More likely you're a low-grade collector, not a curator. You're buying (in the attention economy at least! If not in the actual advertising economy of websites!) what someone else is selling—and you're then reselling it on your blog. You're nothing but a secondary market for someone else's work. Oh and also? You "curators" might want to be careful with your language....
"When you create digital tools that changes people's behavior, you are not a software engineer but a social engineer!" -Jonathan Harris
Oh, hey, you know who else was a social engineer?
Anyway:
In the 16th century, the poet was artist-king. The 19th: the novelist. 20th: the film-maker. I wonder if in the 21st, it'll be the curator. -Joe Hill
Hey, how did we blow past "editor"? Why don't the curators want to be editors?
Anyway, replace "curator" with "people who are really picky with what they share on Facebook" and maybe Joe Hill will be right on the money! Although I suspect that in the 16th century, if not "painter," then actually the "patron" was the "artist-king." (Commissioning is an art! Ask Pope Julius II!) And then that "editors" were the dominant influence in the 19th. And "studios" in the 20th. So I guess now either "ad sales people" or "web engineers" are at the top of the artistic food chain? Oh dear.
by Choire Sicha, The Awl | Read more:
As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I'm fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in a practice of curation. Call it what you like: aggregating? Blogging? Choosing? Copyright infringing sometimes? But it's not actually curation, or anything like it. Your faux TED talk is not going well for you if you are making some point about "curation" replacing "creation" because, well, for starters, "curation" is choosing among things that are created? So like there's nothing for you to curate without creation? This precious bit of dressing-up what people choose to share on the Internet is, sure, silly, but it's also a way for bloggers to distance themselves from the dirty blogging masses. You are no different from some teen in Indiana with a LiveJournal about cutting. Sorry folks! You're in this nasty fray with the rest of us. And your metaphor is all wrong. More likely you're a low-grade collector, not a curator. You're buying (in the attention economy at least! If not in the actual advertising economy of websites!) what someone else is selling—and you're then reselling it on your blog. You're nothing but a secondary market for someone else's work. Oh and also? You "curators" might want to be careful with your language....
"When you create digital tools that changes people's behavior, you are not a software engineer but a social engineer!" -Jonathan Harris
Oh, hey, you know who else was a social engineer?
Anyway:
In the 16th century, the poet was artist-king. The 19th: the novelist. 20th: the film-maker. I wonder if in the 21st, it'll be the curator. -Joe Hill
Hey, how did we blow past "editor"? Why don't the curators want to be editors?
Anyway, replace "curator" with "people who are really picky with what they share on Facebook" and maybe Joe Hill will be right on the money! Although I suspect that in the 16th century, if not "painter," then actually the "patron" was the "artist-king." (Commissioning is an art! Ask Pope Julius II!) And then that "editors" were the dominant influence in the 19th. And "studios" in the 20th. So I guess now either "ad sales people" or "web engineers" are at the top of the artistic food chain? Oh dear.
by Choire Sicha, The Awl | Read more:
The Battery Thermokruzhkus Mug, available at ThinkGeek, helps you power up when your energy levels are low.
Caffeine is our power source, whether it’s from coffee or tea or BAWLS. What better way for us to visualize our batteries being charged than a mug with a battery that powers up when we fill it with our piping hot caffeinated libation of choice?
This ceramic mug is classic black with a white outline of a battery on it. Pour in your hot liquid – anything over 96.8F (36C) – and watch the green cells within the battery light up. As your beverage cools (or is ingested) the battery will fade into emptiness, reminding you that you need a refill.via:
Gratuities Etiquette; Tipping For Success
To tip or not to tip
Arriving at a hotel room with the member of staff whom has just assisted you in finding the way and also brought your bags, there is a momentary awkward pause as he/she waits for ‘something’. You are still absorbing the luxurious fittings, the view from the window and the contents of the mini-bar. Suddenly you become aware they have not yet left. Slightly embarrassed, you apologetically fumble with your cash, a note is offered, it is accepted, but you are left with the distinct impression that they are unimpressed or equally embarrassed. Was that enough, did you get the exchange rate wrong; maybe you actually gave too much?
It is a scenario all but the most savvy of travellers or thick-skinned of us are painfully familiar with, and questions we have often asked ourselves. What is correct gratuities etiquette and how much to tip and when is the right moment to do so? Of course all situations are different; your baggage may have been transported to the room by way of a golf buggy and therefore you may not feel so inclined to provide as much as to the poor young man who carried all your baggage single-handedly up three flights of stairs because the lift was not working!
There is also often a gulf in culture and wealth, both of which can provide a variety of expectations of the gratuity that a hospitality industry worker may expect. Tipping in the United States is almost customary and it is common practice to see American tourists paying small gratuities for almost every service that they receive wherever they travel.
The various cultures throughout Europe have their own customs for providing tips, often dependant on whether it is also common practice for establishments to include a ‘service charge’ within the bill. There was even a television campaign for a well known high street bank in the United Kingdom which inferred that tipping within Iceland was actually considered insulting. However the truth is whilst a tip is never expected as it is usually included in the bill I doubt it is ever refused! Japan however, where gratuities are seldom given, the offer of a tip may cause a degree of embarrassment, confusion and even offence.
Gratuitous gratitude
In some countries, including Egypt (baksheesh), Morocco and even parts of Turkey (bahşiş) tipping is almost de rigueur, and even the tiniest ‘service’ will result in a proffered hand. Examples of this may include showing you the ‘very best’ spot to get your photograph, or just opening a door to see inside a room. It is always a good idea to carry some small denomination coinage around with you for when you feel such a service genuinely warrants a small payment. A word of advice though, if in Egypt do not ever hand your camera to anybody to take a photograph of you, you may have to pay to get it back! (...)
The level of service received and the circumstances of the visit will obviously affect the size of the gratuity. A one off visit to a restaurant where a good meal and excellent service resulted in an extremely pleasant evening will hopefully be rewarded accordingly. Poor service will usually result in little or no tip at all! However a favourite restaurant that you visit regularly and where you have a rapport with the staff will often mean they receive better tips, this encourages better service, you keep returning and it becomes a self perpetuating cycle.
More difficult to judge is the method and size of gratuity that is effective when staying for a week or more at a hotel or resort hotel. It is likely that you will be served by many different staff, chamber maids, bar, waiting and reception staff, pool attendants and concierges, all of which will expect a little remuneration for their services. This is often where some travellers falter, providing a tip for every little act of hospitality they receive. This can work out extremely expensive and may even prove slightly offensive to the receiver as it can be misconceived that their benefactor is actually ‘showing off’ their affluence. (...)
A tipping strategy
It is important to assess the particular person that you are dealing with, how often are they likely to be ‘servicing’ your needs. A chamber maid, waiter at breakfast or pool attendant is likely to deal with you regularly, but the waitress in the expensive a la carte restaurant may only see you once or twice. Upset the wrong member of the team and it could prove costly in terms of your comfort especially as it is likely they will communicate their displeasure with other hotel staff! A horses head in your bed is probably unlikely, but the hospitality industry is awash with stories how of staff have avenged their grievance with guests.
It is appropriate to provide a small, but reasonable tip to staff which are unlikely to be in contact with you often throughout your stay. However those that will be attending to your needs on a daily basis require a more well thought out tipping strategy. I suggest a sensible initial sum is offered to them at the earliest opportunity, hopefully your first encounter with them. Make it perfectly clear that they will get a further tip before you leave if you feel you have been well looked after. This will usually ensure that they work especially hard to keep you happy and will often ask if you have any special requirements. Your room will be well serviced each day and you will often be given the best table available when you arrive for a meal.
by Iain Mallory, Mallory on Travel | Read more:
The Right Chemistry
O.K., let's cut out all this nonsense about romantic love. Let's bring some scientific precision to the party. Let's put love under a microscope.
When rigorous people with Ph.D.s after their names do that, what they see is not some silly, senseless thing. No, their probe reveals that love rests firmly on the foundations of evolution, biology and chemistry. What seems on the surface to be irrational, intoxicated behavior is in fact part of nature's master strategy -- a vital force that has helped humans survive, thrive and multiply through thousands of years. Says Michael Mills, a psychology professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles: "Love is our ancestors whispering in our ears." (...)
Lovers often claim that they feel as if they are being swept away. They're not mistaken; they are literally flooded by chemicals, research suggests. A meeting of eyes, a touch of hands or a whiff of scent sets off a flood that starts in the brain and races along the nerves and through the blood. The results are familiar: flushed skin, sweaty palms, heavy breathing. If love looks suspiciously like stress, the reason is simple: the chemical pathways are identical.
Above all, there is the sheer euphoria of falling in love -- a not-so- surprising reaction, considering that many of the substances swamping the newly smitten are chemical cousins of amphetamines. They include dopamine, norepinephrine and especially phenylethylamine (PEA). Cole Porter knew what he was talking about when he wrote "I get a kick out of you." "Love is a natural high," observes Anthony Walsh, author of The Science of Love: Understanding Love and Its Effects on Mind and Body. "PEA gives you that silly smile that you flash at strangers. When we meet someone who is attractive to us, the whistle blows at the PEA factory."
But phenylethylamine highs don't last forever, a fact that lends support to arguments that passionate romantic love is short-lived. As with any amphetamine, the body builds up a tolerance to PEA; thus it takes more and more of the substance to produce love's special kick. After two to three years, the body simply can't crank up the needed amount of PEA. And chewing on chocolate doesn't help, despite popular belief. The candy is high in PEA, but it fails to boost the body's supply.
Fizzling chemicals spell the end of delirious passion; for many people that marks the end of the liaison as well. It is particularly true for those whom Dr. Michael Liebowitz of the New York State Psychiatric Institute terms "attraction junkies." They crave the intoxication of falling in love so much that they move frantically from affair to affair just as soon as the first rush of infatuation fades.
Still, many romances clearly endure beyond the first years. What accounts for that? Another set of chemicals, of course. The continued presence of a partner gradually steps up production in the brain of endorphins. Unlike the fizzy amphetamines, these are soothing substances. Natural pain-killers, they give lovers a sense of security, peace and calm. "That is one reason why it feels so horrible when we're abandoned or a lover dies," notes Fisher. "We don't have our daily hit of narcotics."
Researchers see a contrast between the heated infatuation induced by PEA, along with other amphetamine-like chemicals, and the more intimate attachment fostered and prolonged by endorphins. "Early love is when you love the way the other person makes you feel," explains psychiatrist Mark Goulston of the University of California, Los Angeles. "Mature love is when you love the person as he or she is." It is the difference between passionate and compassionate love, observes Walsh, a psychobiologist at Boise State University in Idaho. "It's Bon Jovi vs. Beethoven." (...)
A certain smile, a certain face
-- Johnny Mathis
Chemicals may help explain (at least to scientists) the feelings of passion and compassion, but why do people tend to fall in love with one partner rather than a myriad of others? Once again, it's partly a function of evolution and biology. "Men are looking for maximal fertility in a mate," says Loyola Marymount's Mills. "That is in large part why females in the prime childbearing ages of 17 to 28 are so desirable." Men can size up youth and vitality in a glance, and studies indeed show that men fall in love quite rapidly. Women tumble more slowly, to a large degree because their requirements are more complex; they need more time to check the guy out. "Age is not vital," notes Mills, "but the ability to provide security, father children, share resources and hold a high status in society are all key factors."
Still, that does not explain why the way Mary walks and laughs makes Bill dizzy with desire while Marcia's gait and giggle leave him cold. "Nature has wired us for one special person," suggests Walsh, romantically. He rejects the idea that a woman or a man can be in love with two people at the same time. Each person carries in his or her mind a unique subliminal guide to the ideal partner, a "love map," to borrow a term coined by sexologist John Money of Johns Hopkins University.
Drawn from the people and experiences of childhood, the map is a record of whatever we found enticing and exciting -- or disturbing and disgusting. Small feet, curly hair. The way our mothers patted our head or how our fathers told a joke. A fireman's uniform, a doctor's stethoscope. All the information gathered while growing up is imprinted in the brain's circuitry by adolescence. Partners never meet each and every requirement, but a sufficient number of matches can light up the wires and signal, "It's love." Not every partner will be like the last one, since lovers may have different combinations of the characteristics favored by the map.
by Anastasia Toufexis, Time | Read more:
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