Ubiquitous Place(s)

June 21, 2007

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve read many interesting things about “the local,” a topos (literally!) that’s being mined in the wake of our lengthy infatuation / fascination with “the global.” I suppose it’s about time — maybe you can’t be general without being specific, and vice versa. Trendwatching kicked things off in early […]

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Johnny Five: “Life in Transition” and “Johnny’s Cave” on NYTimes video

June 15, 2007

It’s only 9 minutes long (not counting the 15 second commercial that comes first), but Life in Transition, a video produced by the New York Times about Johnny Five, a homeless man also known as The Mayor of Ogden Avenue (in the Bronx), who probably has schizophrenia as well a drug addiction, is one of […]

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My “yes, minister” moment…?

June 11, 2007

So many interesting things I should be commenting on, if only to have some trace for my own overburdened memory… Things I’ve been reading, in books and online; events I’ve been able to attend, spoken words, conversations: all ephemera. And yet themes emerge. If there’s a metaphor, maybe it’s that I’m skating not on thin […]

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Wow… (Body by Dance — Nike)

June 8, 2007

An amazing ad for Nike on YouTube, must see. (Click through — I can’t seem to be able to embed YouTube videos here.) (found via if! from PSFK, who got it via Buenos Aires Spotting. Thanks, guys!) (PS/edit: in particular, if you want more background information on the ad, click through to Buenos Aires Spotting […]

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“500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art”

May 28, 2007

This is an interesting video, in a very weird sort of way: 500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art (via CultureGrrl, who adds a link also to “80 Years of Female Portraits in Cinema” — also on YouTube and from the same contributor, but you have to click through to her page to access […]

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Graduate, v. or n.

May 26, 2007

Jay Parini, in his article The Model Graduation Speaker, writes that he tends to cry at weddings and graduations, “though rarely at funerals.” Well, I graduated into some BS today, and what he wrote very nearly made me cry, even as it worked to repair reality. Especially that last bit: For the most part, I […]

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Some Monday links

May 22, 2007

Via an affair with urban policy, I just discovered CitySkip (the blog), which posted some uncanny YouTube videos. First, there’s a film by Colourfield Productions (Dortmund, Germany) about Stephen Wiltshire, an autistic man characterised as an “art savant” and “human camera.” The film chronicles how he was taken on a 45 minute helicopter flight over […]

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Posting glitch

May 18, 2007

Melanie from Down Under alerted me that my blog entry from yesterday showed up in her RSS reader, but when she clicked through, it wasn’t there. Another person reported that it didn’t show up in RSS at all. So I did some checking, and lo!, I had for some reason marked it as “private” under […]

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The insect and the caveman: science fiction, individualism, urbanism

May 17, 2007

No, I haven’t dropped off the face of the planet again — although this long hiatus admittedly suggests something drastic. It is true, however, that I’m waiting for a proverbial other shoe to drop, which it should do by the end of this month, and that this state-of-waiting has compromised my agility. But soon I’ll […]

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Well that’s better than specializing…

May 1, 2007

I love Trevor Boddy’s articles, whether they appear in national newspapers or in magazines. He’s an independent and smart thinker who writes fearlessly about urbanism, architecture, cities. One of his latest articles is in the Toronto-based Globe & Mail newspaper, ‘Design guidelines are uniformly lame’ — a title that reworks a quote, which in turn […]

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