The LA Times on what was to be an exclusive Florida gated community. Now developers “believe they have a chance to help local government purchase and preserve this stretch of waterfront… Chelius and Size spoke about the native plants that could be restored — the sabal palmetto palm, the seagrape trees, the three native species of mangrove. With the vegetation would come more native animals, more birds.”
Geoengineering going mainstream.
A wedding dress out of latex gloves, a chandelier of discarded eyeglasses, buttons and glue make stalagmite, and a collection of old records become a wave. Inhabitat takes a look at Museum of Arts and Design “Second Lives” exhibit. More from NYT’s Roberta Smith, who says the show, “confirms how thoroughly blurred the lines dividing art, craft and design have become over the past few decades.”
Chicago-area buildings endangered, a photoset by the Chicago Tribune, (whose own iconic tower will be condos, should Sam Zell get his way.) Aggressive plans for energy efficiency and poor upkeep have put many remarkable structures like Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Hospital and Elgin Mental Health Center, and even a Frank Lloyd Wright home at risk. More from the Sun-Times. Stop Smiling gets a “sinking feeling,” as would anyone lucky enough to have spent time in the city.
When Humanity Only Survives Within Driving Distance of a Shopping Mall
The city can become an addiction. Live in it too long, and your body will reject the outdoors. Over the weekend, I got up early-ish to catch La Strada at the Brattle (part of the free Elements Of Cinema series.) It seemed like a good Saturday morning thing: get coffee, watch a smart film, maybe browse the dress shops and get coffee again.
But as soon as I opened my eyes, they started to burn. I left the window open that night and the airborne pollens — ragweed or whatever it is that Zyrtec normally takes care of — drifted into my room and into my eyes like evil pixie dust. I shut my window, got dressed, and did what I normally don’t do trying to get to Harvard Square: I drove.
The whole “pahk the cah in hahvahd yahd” thing is a joke not just on the Boston accent. Driving in Harvard Square is kind of like pushing marbles through straws. Saturday morning isn’t much of a problem. Well, any Saturday other than yesterday.
Due to construction, the two and three hour parking spots within eight blocks were unavailable. The open spots were limited to one hour. Hardly enough time to attend a movie and a lecture. No going around it: the meter maids in this city are busybodies. After circling around several times, wishing I were on my bike, I ended up parking much farther than I intended and came smack in contact with exactly what I’d been avoiding all morning: the outside air.
It was a beautiful day. Low 80s, clear skies, perfect for biking, running, reading under a tree, anything outside. But rather than delighting in the weather, I was cursing it. Lightheaded, my eyes feeling like sandpaper lined the rims, sneezing, I was just a mess. I thought wearing glasses would make it better but it was just the opposite: contact lenses shield against these allergens. The sunshine was bouncing off the lenses, only making the situation worse.
This is urban New England, I’m hardly Lawrence of Arabia in a sandstorm, but it bothered me so much, and realizing I was already twenty minutes late, I returned to my car thinking, “how far to the Cambridgeside Galleria?”
I was looking for refuge from the outside world in the form of a shopping mall. My body was rejecting nature in favor of the sanitized, always-68 degrees shopping center down the street. So I watched the sky from the Whole Foods cafe, waiting until I could blink again without discomfort.
Just as domesticated pets can’t make it in the wilderness, city people, according to the “hygiene hypothesis,” live in such clean conditions their immune systems weaken. Preschool peanut bans are so prevalent and contentious, I wouldn’t be surprised if the DEA gets involved eventually.
In addition to increased sensitivity, cities produce more ragweed due to CO2 levels — increasing with climate change. There are additional ripple effects on tree pollen, fungal spores, and other allergens. And warmer climate means the allergy season is much longer than it ever was before.
Years ago, people with severe allergies found relief in the mountains. But “increased human activity such as building and other disturbances of the soil, irrigation, and gardening, have encouraged ragweed to spread to these areas as well.” We’re building our way unhealthy.
Damien Atkins’s play “Lucy” (Kurt Anderson interview here) is about an anthropologist with a 13 year old autistic daughter. She comes to the conclusion her daughter “is perfect. She’s the future,” making a stunning hypothesis that autism is evolution. Mankind is protecting itself from the devastating environmental consequences of modern living. (A little Kumbaya, but quite a lot smarter than whatever M Night Shyamalan was going on.)
Wall-E so radically tackled devolution with the future human race portrayed as gelatinous blobs. More accurately they would have sneezed uncontrollably at contact with the plant.
Todd Haynes’s 1995 film [Safe] was a great comment/parody/prophesy of the modern age fraught with yuppie ailments:
“Safe” has been described as a horror movie of the soul, a description that director Todd Haynes relishes. California housewife Carol White seems to have it all in life: a wealthy husband and a beautiful house. The only thing she lacks is a strong personality: Carol seems timid and empty during all of her interactions with the world around her. At the beginning of the film, one would consider her to be more safe in life than just about anyone. That doesn’t turn out to be the case. Starting with headaches and leading to a grand-mal seizure, Carol becomes more and more sick, claiming that she’s become sensitive to the common toxins in today’s world: exhaust, fumes, aerosol spray, etc. She pulls back from the sexual advances of her husband and spends her nights alone by the TV or wandering around the outside of her well-protected home like an animal in a cage. Her physician examines her and can find nothing wrong. An allergist finds that she has an allergic reaction to milk but explains that there is no treatment for that sort of allergy. She sees a psychiatrist who does nothing but make her nervous. In the hospital, Carol sees an infomercial for Wrenwood, a new-age retreat for those who are “environmentally ill,” and leaves her husband and stepson to try and find salvation at this retreat: headed by a phony, grandstanding, “sensitive” individual named Peter Dunning.
I remember watching it in high school, thinking “just get over it!” Likely someone is thinking the same thing reading my opening paragraph. It’s embarrassing, but I’m not alone:
Ragweed pollen and mold thrive in the opposite conditions. So when it’s dry and windy, you get ragweed; when it’s damp and rainy, you get mold.
Here’s the other cheerful news, you might want to prepare for a worse ragweed season next year. Dr. Mark Dykewicz, chief of the Section of Allergy & Clinical Immunology, at St. Louis University School of Medicine says that next year’s ragweed crop will be from this years rainy, fertile conditions.
In Europe, they are putting up “Wild West ‘wanted’ posters” advocating burning the ragwood (”ambrosia”) plants, which climbing north to Germany, and even Scandinavia.
‘Some gardeners naively think it is an attractive plant and give it water and fertilizer in their front gardens,’ says Susanne Schwarz of Berlin’s Health Department.
‘They should be eradicating this menace instead,’ she adds. ‘Best thing to do is pull it out by the roots and burn it, since the seeds can remain fertile for up to 40 years.’
In case you’re wondering, yeah, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment this week. In the meantime, a friend advised me to take local honey because the pollen in the honey acclimates you to the pollen in the air. Sounds unlikely, but I appreciate the concept as a narrative. Maybe if The Happening hadn’t resigned itself as a joke, Mark Walberg would have hunted the wilderness for an antidote. A lab set up in the fields somewhere. The twist ending M Night Shymalan forgot to write, like a riff on Dorothy’s discovery: the answer is “no further than our own backyard”
Until then, closing my eyes is as heavenly as a dive in a pool full of feathers. And I’m thinking allergies are nature’s way of reminding us to pay attention.
Photography by Julia Fullerton-Batten.
Previously:
Who Needs Sleep?
An Apology for Idlers
Related links:
- Hygiene Hypothesis on PBS, Evolution: “The Evolutionary Arms Race”
- Architects take Beijing’s smog into account, LA Times (via.)
- Ragweed Allergy Heats Up With Climate Change, Medical News Today
- Take Me Out To The (Peanut-Free) Ballgame, Channel3000
BBC reports on e-waste dumping in Ghana. It’s a good overview of the problem: Western countries avoid bans on exporting dead computers (and their toxic contents) by shipping them abroad off as “usable second-hand goods” — much worse as this can be a tax write-off. An expert estimates 90% of the computers shipped to Africa are “just junk.” More from Treehugger’s Simran Sethi on HuffPost.
Greg Lundgren in Seattle seems to be taking a literal interpretation of Timothy Leary’s ideas about dying glamorously. The artist is behind the “boutique death movement,” with a shop that points clients toward a number of odd burial rituals (and blog memes over the past five years) like LifeGem (turning ashes into a diamond) or Memorial Space Flights. Eventually, he plans to sell burial ground inside public sculptures, “What if 30 people got together to buy themselves space in a Jeff Koons? Cemeteries are among the last urban green spaces. They need to be sculpture parks. Forget zombies from the ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ I’d like to see people playing chess among the tombstones, kids skipping rope or texting their friends.”
Rules for an American Fantasy Road Trip
The Wall Street Journal’s list of 50 things we can blame on high gas prices was all over the blogs this week. Strangely missing from it is the fact that cross-country roadtripping, the quintessential American experience, is becoming obsolete. This summer we should all be so lucky to weave in and out of little backwater and dirt road towns, where the people stare as they would at aliens, look at the young city persons with their skinny jeans and asymmetric haircuts!
Of course, the best way to roadtrip, as films would have it, is to go it alone. Then you are more likely to come across an attractive stranger, with whom you will exchange sidelong glances — sometimes through the rearview mirror. At the first rest stop, you will have the chance to evaluate whether or not the mysterious stranger is height/weight proportionate and not crazy-seeming (well, maybe a little crazy,) but this is still not the time to proceed with anything.
Several states later, another rest stop, and you exchange a faint “Hey,” and maybe a nod. Then you get gas someplace else toward the end of the day and have a deep conversation over a cup of terrible coffee about the terrible things that have happened to you in the past, like some uncle who used to beat you in the woodshed or something, carefully neglecting to mention your hometown, name, occupation, or age.
At some point in the conversation, one will ask the other, “Where are you going?”
“Nowhere,” with a shrug, is the only appropriate response to this question.
No one asks where you are coming from.
Only at the 5th rest stop, and the third cup of terrible coffee and second or third vague conversation, is it appropriate to inquire, “So where are you staying tonight?” Illicit substances may or may not be procured at this point in the adventure. The next morning you must have breakfast at a diner, maybe a retrofitted train car, where a middle-aged frizzy haired waitress with an obsolete name like “Blanche” or “Mildred” serves rubbery omelette with white bread toast and margarine. Different kinds of pies and grapenut custard are displayed in a revolving glass case by the door.
Five Easy Pieces is my favorite road movie, pretty much because it’s my favorite movie. But Laurie Bird in Two-lane Blacktop is the consummate roadtrip lady friend. She’s credited as “the girl,” even though she appears in a quarter of all the scenes, she never gets a name. So yeah, no exchanging names on the road. You’re nothing more than “the girl,” with nothing more than a backpack to hold all of your possessions. That’s another rule.
Sadly, the beautifully wistful Laurie Bird killed herself when she was 25 in her boyfriend Art Garfunkel’s apartment — he who wrote the consummate roadtrip lyric, “Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike/ They’ve all gone to look for America.”
There’s that other roadtrip lyric, “Standing on the corner in Winslow Arizona,” which created a tourism platform in Winslow, Arizona out of necessity.
When Interstate 40 replaced Route 66, towns along 66 shuttered their diners and B&Bs. There were no more weary road travelers to feed. In the meantime, the Jackson Browne stomping ground capitalized on the song’s success by building a public space called “Standin’ on the Corner Park” complete with a totally heinous looking statue of someone “standin’ on the corner”:
A brief history of the town per Wikipedia:
The scene described in the song was replicated as a trompe-l’oeil mural painted on the side of a building in Standin’ on the Corner Park in Winslow. On October 18, 2004, a fire destroyed the building on which the mural was painted. The wall and the mural were preserved, but the park temporarily closed.
In November of 2006, the city of Winslow purchased the property where the building had stood. The wall with the mural was secured and the rest of the building torn down.
As of August 2007, the corner of the park, with the statue and the mural, is accessible again. Plans are underway to expand the mural to cover the remaining wall, and to expand the park onto both sides of the wall.
The town also posted a billboard on I-40 with the words: “Winslow, Arizona says ‘Take it easy’”.
Wikipedia also says the road movie, “has its roots in spoken and written tales of epic journeys, such as the Odyssey and the Aeneid. The road film is a standard plot employed by screenwriters. It is a kind of bildungsroman, a kind of story in which the hero changes, grows or improves over the course of the story. The modern “road picture” is to filmmakers what the heroic quest was to Medieval writers.” My then boyfriend, a few years ago, a very paranoid person who was nevertheless usually right about these things, always used to say “this is the last year we can roadtrip so we should do it now,” but at the time I thought going abroad would make the best escape.
Now it’s true. The roadtrip is already a forgotten concept like a drive-in movie. And there’s no other American experience that can take its place.
Images by Stephen Shore (except for the “Standin’ on the Corner”)
Previously:
Low-Tech Movement: Not Just Pedestrian Pride
Urban Safaris: Graffiti Sites Considered for Heritage Protection
Related links:
- Legends of America
- VQR: No Way Home
- Good news about $4 gas? Fewer traffic deaths, Eurekalert
- Out of the wilderness, The Economist, “People are shunning the great outdoors. Blame conservationists, not video games.”
- Martin’s Route 66 Gallery & Essay
- Goodbye to the Great American Road Trip, NYT
- Route 66 – The Land That Time Forgot, Dave Wyman
A Trip to the Zoo
The eyes of an animal when they consider a man are attentive and wary. The same animal may well look at other species the same way. He does not reserve a special look for man. But by no other species except man will the animal’s look be recognized as familiar. Other animals are held by the look. Man becomes aware of himself returning the look….
The relation may become clearer by comparing the look of an animal with the look of another man. Between two men the two abysses are, in principle, bridged by language. Even if the encounter is hostile and no words are used (even if the two speak different languages), the existence of language allows that at least one of them, if not mutually, is confirmed by the other. Language allows men to reckon with each other as with themselves. (In the confirmation made possible by language, human ignorance and fear may also be confirmed. Whereas in animals fear is a response to signal, in men it is endemic.) … No animal confirms man, either positively or negatively…The first metaphor was animal, it was because the essential relationship between man and animal was metaphoric. Within that relation what the two terms — man and animal — shared in common revealed what differentiated them. And vice versa.
-John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking.
So maybe dolphins didn’t really commit mass suicide, and maybe elephants can’t really paint self-portraits, and maybe a parrot never served as key witness in a murder trial, and maybe monkeys don’t have real conversations– animals are a lot smarter than you think. 
To the left is my dog’s favorite toy, to the right is a coffee cup that scares the bejeebus out of her (it’s also a picture of her doppleganger.) Another example of how uncanny valley creeps out animals too.
The other day, I was in a shopping mall and for whatever reason stopped by the pet store. It was a typical mall pet store, the size of a closet, at the far corner where all the cheap and badly maintained stores are located. Seeing a dozen or so puppies in their cages gave me a terrible sense of guilt. Like I should take them all — pay for them — and save them from further torture. But that would only encourage the store to breed more puppies in even worse conditions.
The Sundance Channel’s Big Ideas for a Small Planet “animals” special is the best episode in an already great series. They highlighted an animal shelter in Dallas doing its best to provide safe, friendly, spacious (green) conditions for its inhabitants. The structural changes indirectly raised a practical question: who is going to go to the pound if you are only going to experience that guilty feeling that you need to save them all?
Another segment was on the maintenance of the Bronx zoo, where they emphasize that conservation is their major goal. It got me thinking about how much has changed since John Berger wrote “Why Look at Animals?” in 1977. Berger’s essay talks about the way zoos at once seek the distinction given to museums, although they are taking subjects out of the natural environment in order to display. So what you have is an animal with a “frame around it.”
Visitors visit the zoo to look at animals. They proceed from cage to cage, not unlike the visitors in an art gallery who stop in front of one painting, and then more on to the next or the one after next… When you look at these animals, even if the animal is up against the bars, less than a foot from you, looking outwards in the public direction, you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal; and the concentration you can muster will never be enough to render it…
The space in which they inhabit is artificial. Hence their tendency to bundle towards the edge of it. (Beyond the edges there may be real space.) In some cages the light is equally artificial. In all cases the environment is illusory.
Now zoo architects are working toward building less artificial environments(and cages are no longer acceptable in metropolitan zoos.) Still, the just open Norman Foster elephant house for the Copenhagen Zoo, and news surrounding it, shows the debate whether a zoo should exist at all never went away.
A design critic at The Guardian says, in an otherwise an enthusiastic post about the zoo addition, “How can any architect even begin to match the subtlety of a spider’s web or recreate the landscapes and forests elephants call home? Zoo architecture is, at best, an art, or beast, of uneasy and uncertain compromise.”
Images by Sarah Moon. Brightcove video and more about the artist.
One of my favorite parts of any novel is in The Drowned World. When the city of London is finally drained, the characters aren’t pleased, in fact they’re horrified. They can’t believe people lived in these structures and streets so far removed from nature (this isn’t a spoiler by the way, it happens in the middle of the book.) So it’s funny to see that these images from squint/opera, so obviously inspired by the book, are getting a largely positive reaction: “Look at what these people are doing; fishing, swimming, DIY, playing and tinkering within peaceful contexts. All positive things within buildings that have seen their day within this scenario,” says one comment. “That water is crystal clear. Looks like a wonderful place to live,” says another. You must take a look at the images by the way. The film and media studio’s “Flooded London” set is part of the London Festival of Architecture.
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